"Given that our civilization is unable to assimilate well even those concepts that originate in human heads when they appear outside its main current, although the creators of those concepts are, after all, children of the same age—how could we have assumed that we would be capable of understanding a civilization totally unlike ours, if it addressed us across the cosmic gulf?"
I've never bought Wittgenstein's Lion for similar reasons. I am able to communicate with my cat, though it is not easy. We don't need language to do this.
It is also important to note that understanding is not equal. Certainly I understand my cat far better than she understands me. Famously Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are mutually intelligible[0], yet this does not create equal understanding between all parties. Norwegians fair the best while Swedes are out of luck. It probably isn't surprising that this happens even when all speakers are speaking the same language. You can speak in front of 10 people and you may hear 15 different interpretations, none need be what you intended.
Language is messy. It's incredible communication happens with it. But we're smart creatures, and there's ways to establish frames of reference. We have theory of mind, even if we don't all use it. But using it certainly helps. Communication is best when all parties are trying their best to understand one another. Sometimes we confuse that to mean we're trying because we're talking. You're not trying unless you're considering what was intended to be said, despite the words used. To which, that, I agree is the lion.
We all share many similar biological imperatives And these contrived examples because we all evolved on the same planet. Even the worst case scenario of the Dark Forest has many anthropomorphic priors within.
Imagine an intelligent shade of blue. Thank you, Douglas Adams. I suspect we have no idea WTF is out there and I'm not a carbon chauvinist like Carl Sagan was. But I wish I would have lived long enough to find out and I suspect that won't be the case.
There's also a lot of "universals" that people take for granted as universal when it really isn't universal.
Things off the top of my head that humans usually take for granted as "universals":
- Separation of memory and DNA. What if memories were stored in DNA and can be passed between individuals?
- Inability to share memories. What if memories can be passed around like semen and sweat?
- Inability to easily read others' minds. What if kissing/touching someone would share all of each others' thoughts? How would that alien society develop differently?
- Existence of the ego. What if they live in a constant state of ego death, like some humans on certain drugs?
- Separation of the id and the superego. This is... one way to solve an alignment problem, I suppose. Imagine a species which replaced their sense of hunger/sexual craving, with a craving for morality. And they execute creatures like humans when they see a human do anything immoral, such as eating an ice cream when it can reduce your lifespan and thus deprive your children of a parent, or deprive your society of tax dollars.
- And many other possible examples that i can come up with that exists within human "thoughtspace", let alone concepts that do not exist within human thoughtspace
How would you feel if you met an alien species that communicates by raping their children? If that sounds weird to you, what if they can communicate via the DNA in sperm, so it'd be somewhat similar to how human sex transmits information from the human male to the human female?
> - And many other possible examples that i can come up with that exists within human "thoughtspace", let alone concepts that do not exist within human thoughtspace
> would you feel common ground with a predatory fish?
The fish needs to eat, I need to eat. The fish has the drive to procreate, so do I, or at least I have a sex drive.
> Or a plant?
We both need sunlight to live, we both require a breathable atmosphere. We both need water.
> An insect colony?
Much of the above applies here as well, in addition to that I can see similarities between a large insect colony and our large cities, how things move, how roads and buildings are adjusted for efficiencies, how bad actors can harm the system.
Yes, I can see common ground between myself and all three of those things you listed.
Not the parent comment but what's your point? You can't use that common ground for anything, let alone communication, can you?. The fish wants to fuck? You want to too, what now? How do you stablish a common ground to understanding based on such things?
Pertinent here is that said fish has done something notable enough to have been discovered from, literally, across the galaxy. Those fish built some sort of civilization such that they're sending our lasers, radio waves, or building Dyson spheres.
And yet, look at how pretty much every human society deals with immigrants/refugees. We most often find the least common ground between races, ethnicities, nationalities, or any other way to create outgroups, and you think humanity will handle an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization well?
> We most often find the least common ground between races, ethnicities, nationalities, or any other way to create outgroups, and you think humanity will handle an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization well?
But we find PLENTY of common grownds when we talk to the smartesr of those groups and races, across milenia and continents via groups, scientific forums, discussion books.
We find very little common grounds when we have forced encounters with the uneducated trouble makers up to no good, in systems designed for high trust abused by said individuals.
> We find very little common grounds when we have forced encounters with the uneducated trouble makers up to no good, in systems designed for high trust abused by said individuals.
I'd bet good money lots of non-Western European civilizations had that same thought after the English, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. rolled up on their shores.
Domesticated mammalian[1] pet which share 80+% of our DNA and bred and naturally self-selected over few ten thousand generations for their obedience and take fair amount of training from birth is not the same as anything else on earth let alone from another planet.
[1] Domesticating of non mammalian animals is already quite hard with limited true successes, some birds probably come the closest.
Does it make you uncomfortable to think an alien civilization might be somehow superior to humans? That's a pretty immature thing to be insecure about.
What if they're indifferent about our existence? Would you be insecure knowing that a superior species existed that didn't think we were interesting enough to be bothered with?
What if they are telepathic hive minds, able to regrow lost minds like some species on earth regrow limbs, thus having no concept of individual death as such?
Or something like the Cylon resurrection technology, which downloads your memories into the latest fast cloned avatar/physical body?
This is referenced in a sci fi book "The dark forest" of the series "The 3 body problem". It sets a convincing narrative that because of time taken for observation and response and development speed of society it is most likely that all civilizations that announce themselves would likely be a threat in terms of technological supremacy eventually to observing civilizations. In other words, we don't hear anything because any sufficiently advanced civilization would not want to risk being discovered. I.e., the "dark silent forest".
I never did buy the dark forest argument. I mean, even in the books, there were smidgeons of humanity left over. And then all the dimension collapsing strangeness. You just can never be sure.
I dunno, it just reeks of the culture of suspicion in communist China. A product of that place and time.
My own idea is the 'used car salesman' idea of the universe. (Reeking of my own mind and place and time). To me, economics will rule in the galactic community. In that water, metals, energy, it's all cheap and everywhere. No need to have any competition over it. No, the only scarce thing is life and then even more it's intelligence. Any other civilization will be desperate to get rights over us and our history.
So, to me, the aliens will come to us loud and proud. Balloons and banners.
And of course, a contract as long as a the rings of Saturn, with print as small as the atoms.
We shouldn't be wary of the weapons, but the lawyers
>So, to me, the aliens will come to us loud and proud. Balloons and banners.
Charles Stross' Singularity Sky seems the most reasonable to me. Superintelligent computers trade unimaginable technology (their infintely replicable trash) for their most sought after asset (new forms of entertainment) and then just piss off to another world having completely bent our cultural development.
I agree, the dark forest argument seems rooted in a kind of paranoia bordering on the insane. No sane culture says “we better just exterminate anyone else we come across just in case,” which is essentially the threat that the dark forest is guarding against. And a culture that does act that way is likely to end up exterminating itself.
The reason for the paranoia is that the risks are maximal. Any planet can destroy any other planet by accelerating a small projectile at it, so long as it achieves sufficient kinetic force. The projectile can be so tiny as to be effectively undetectable until it’s too late. So you have a situation where everyone you meet is carrying WMDs, and you can’t guarantee you’ll be able to get revenge if they fire first. Finally, every actor knows the predicament and nothing else about the other actors. If you don’t know who is on the other side of the radio transmission, but you do know they can destroy you immediately and without consequence, and you know they know you can do the same to them, the only rational choice is to shoot first, because you’d better not shoot second!
But the reverse it true too. You can't be sure you got every one of the other species. Especially with the transmission times at light speed. In the books, they use these dimension collapsing bombs to eradicate everything, but, um, those don't actually exist. Even in the books, humanity still survives in little groups, some bent on vengeance.
Much safer to make friends or coinvestors, slaves at the very least. Get them all to buy in and police themselves. Better yet, you take that one rare thing, life, intelligence, and put it to work for you. Make the aliens you've just contacted be a part of the pyramid scheme
And yet we see nations like Russia (well, leaders like Putin) acting as if the world is a zero-sum game. The war in Ukraine vaguely looks like the Borg trying to assimilate every resource (geographical or human) in sight.
China (well, Xi) seems to be eyeing a similar path. I feel like there's something worth noting about the Three Body Problem being a product of its culture.
I really have a hard time understanding this train of thought.
One could say these sentences are also a product of "its culture".
The world is not black or white, good or evil. Things are more nuanced and complicated than advertised to be.
I'm not the single source of truth either, but I think there are lots of resources for people interested in avoiding propaganda and trying to understand things more deeply.
In that scenario, there is a galactic community. Galactic community is going to have something like contracts, and a way to enforce them. It might be a problem for Earth since we would have to get to planet with court, and we don't have FTL.
Galactic community might have rules about developing species, but we can make agreements once "escape".
The decision to not respond should not be considered an option for the UN. They can get a week max to decide what to respond, but a response needs to be sent quick. Otherwise you can assume someone will take the choice away and respond anyway. That someone could be a nation not liking the UN discussions, or it could be a rogue scientists with access to the powerful radios. (I doubt most of us could respond if we wanted to - even if someone is willing to break all laws they are either protected by too much security or they are too expensive to afford - but I guarantee someone who works at such a facility is willing to risk responding if governments delay too long)
Even if the UN makes a respond expect someone else to send a different one at some point.
The interlocutor on the other end experiencing time (or reasoning) at a different scale is an interesting case too, imagine a week feeling like centuries to them.
No individual is going to have the resources to respond to an alien signal unless it comes from Proxima Centari (very maybe) or not much further. No current earth broad would be easily recognizable from Proxima Centari with earth technology - a factor to consider when thinking about why entities aren't being easily detected. A powerful and very carefully aimed laser might work for greater distances but that wouldn't be something that can assembled in someone's garage.
But oppositely, if naturally defusing radio waves could be somehow detected from some further away location, the aliens would know already we're here and indeed lots about us so hand wringing about responding seems dumb there too.
this is a question i have explored as part of my own scifi world building:
what is a realistic timeline for first contact, and how will it actually happen?
so we decode a message that we are pretty sure is of alien origin.
we send a message back and then wait a few decades or centuries.
we don't know how far away the origin of the message is. let's assume that it is less than 50 light years. that's still a round trip of 100 years. in other words it's a generational project, and we don't know if our first response is understood. we'll have to keep iterating until we can confirm that we are actually communicating. and then, the next step will be to try to understand each other.
with a round trip that long, even under the most optimal conditions just establishing a dialog based on say math is going to take a few centuries.
of course once we have a dialog, communication is going to speed up because then we can send longer messages.
but then it could still take anywhere from 500 to 1000 years before a common language is developed and we are able to share actual scientific and engineering knowledge.
once we reached that level of communication however, we can collaborate on developing FTL.
contrary to star trek, it was always my idea that FTL travel is not developed by the inhabitants of each planet/star system on their own, but only in collaboration across multiple such systems. maybe even more than two. driven by the desire to meet each other.
so from the point of the first received message it will be one millennium before we get to learn anything about and from these aliens, and another millennium before we can meet them in person.
and that's the optimistic projection. it could just as well take 10 times as long.
We wouldn’t have a long back and forth to establish a common language, we would likely send something like https://cosmicos.github.io.
“CosmicOS is a way to create messages suitable for communication across large gulfs of time and space. It is inspired by Hans Freudenthal's language, Lincos, and Carl Sagan's book, Contact. CosmicOS, at its core, is a programming language, capable of expressing simulations. Simulations are a way to talk, by anology, about the real thing they model.
CosmicOS is structured to communicate the usual math and logic basics, then use that to show how to run programs, then send interesting programs that demonstrate behaviors and interactions, and start communicating ideas through ”theater” and simulations. This is inspired by Freudenthal's idea of staging conversations between his imaginary characters Ha and Hb.”
if you like science fiction, you may enjoy reading the bobiverse by dennis e. taylor. it describes exactly that scenario, except that the AI is an uploaded human. but that's pretty much the same thing.
Consider that, if the time separation is long enough via light then physical limits make it such that we do not ever have a chance of contact in which case this exchange is essentially indistinguishable from communication with supernatural beings.
Not that I believe they are the same, but many people will come to this conclusion and they would not be probably wrong. Causality is strange.
While physically possible, that is even less likely than FTL. It takes enormous amounts of fuel to reach relativistic speeds even with things like antimatter engines. Speeds fast enough for other galaxies are not possible unless invent impossible reactionless drive.
I don't know how you can say it's even less likely than FTL since everything we know shows that FTL is impossible. Virtually impossible is much easier than actually impossible.
I don't know about faster than light, but as soon as we have real AI, it will simply be information and should be able to travel at about speed of light.
It may be simply information, but if you put it into a radio signal and send it into the universe it won’t do anything on its own. Not unless someone receives it and understands it well enough to execute it. Assuming they’d want to - I guess it’s the interstellar equivalent of downloading and running a program from a spam email.
Yes! NP was originally written in 2010 so it's vanilla js on the client. Had a python server for many years, but when I had to move from python 2, I switched to js for the server as well. When the server was python I was using googles app engine database (can't remember what its called right now). These days, just a vanilla postgres and boring old SQL statements.
>The name of the hypothesis derives from Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest, as in a "dark forest" filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like ghosts". According to the dark forest hypothesis, since the intentions of any newly contacted civilization can never be known with certainty, then if one is encountered, it is best to make a preemptive strike, in order to avoid the potential extinction of one's own species. The novel provides a detailed investigation of Liu's concerns about alien contact.
Liu Cixin had to break the laws of physics -- badly, multiple times -- in order to make the Dark Forest game theory work. That's not a problem, fictional rules are good fun, but generalizing his conclusions back to the real world without sending them through a customs inspection first is a problem. See also: do the dinosaurs escape because the laws of chaos theory dictate that dinosaur zoos are mathematically impossible? Or do they escape because otherwise I wouldn't pay to see the movie and neither would you?
If we ground ourselves back in reality where the speed of light is probably law and the spooky aliens probably don't get to tamper the laws of physics, the actual game-theoretic winning move is always to grow voraciously, threat or no.
Where the speed of light is probably law (our universe) there is no way aliens could reach earth. The only possibly scenario where earth is in danger is if we terraform and colonize mars (Venus would also do, or a few other large rocks), then we have a falling out and start a major war. The few survivors would not know if anyone is on Mars, but if so they might still be out to get earth so better be quiet. If you are not already in this solar system you can't get here in a useful timeframe no matter how long lived you are.
We should expand our definition of Aliens visiting earth.
If we received a signal (at light speed) that described how to build a physical alien computer, and then ran a program on that computer, which happened to be AI, we would have alien visitors.
What would we become in such a universe? We would take a step back, it will become about survival again (I know it's like that on earth here and there), not about growing together, exploring. It's like Star Trek's mirror universe.
Sure I'd fight for humanity, but I'd be so disappointed. Maybe even enough to just give up.
(I have to admit I just could not make it through part 2 of the Three Body problem, it went to slow for me.)
> The Berserker hypothesis, also known as the deadly probes scenario, is the idea that humans have not yet detected intelligent alien life in the universe because it has been systematically destroyed by a series of lethal Von Neumann probes.
Yeah but they clearly didn't do a very good job on Earth so how systematic could they be?
Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful premise for a book which can simply mobilize a plot device to brush this problem aside. However, if we want to bring the conclusions back to reality they have to undergo a customs inspection which flags said plot device.
Personally, I like the plot idea that all of the intelligent aliens know of earth life but intentionally ignore us because they visited in the time of the dinosaurs or even before. There's some material the universe values like how we value oil, and they simply extracted all of it from our solar system. This material allows for whatever sci-fi thing we think is impossible, worm holes, constant acceleration, FTL travel, Dyson sphere material, etc.
They could. However their different way might be worse than our concept.
Though survival of the fittest is likely a law and so they will have a concept of competition between groups of some form (though their definition of groups will be different) simply because those without will be destroyed by the first group that does have that concept.
IIRC the author said there are no meta layers of meaning, it’s just honest to god fiction written to be entertaining. I’m struggling a little myself to accept that for the entire trilogy, but that’s that.
I haven’t read these books but it’s not unreasonable that this author or any other author could have reason to not be forthright about what their book is about
- Setup a massive array of antennas in space for reception only
- Try to decode their radio traffic and understand how they are exchanging information
- Steal their their knowledge and use it to advance human race forward.
- Reduce all our electromagnetic emissions to minimum to deny them the same advantage. Forbid anyone from sending signal towards them so we have time to technologically catch up to them without them noticing.
Any kind of contact will ends up in abysmal disaster as we have seen in the past, when advanced civilization shown up on shores of less advanced one.
Hopefully we never have the pleasure of discovering Prothean style ruins on a nearby planet and Pluto isn't actually a frozen mass relay. That one never ends well.
Though I personally love the idea of advanced, civilized extraterrestrial life. I hope it exists (statistically feels likely but yet to be confirmed). Even if it turns out we humans are at a near lockstep with another civilization it'd be game changing if we could communicate especially.
All that said, maybe there's a "galactic civilization onboarding" program once a species meets a sufficiently advanced criteria independently, with no outside intervention. Perhaps the universe will turn our ideas on their head, and assumptions may not apply.
Our understanding of the world, for however great it is, is still likely full of things we can't fathom and unknowns we don't know. Its fun to speculate but the reality is we are only basing most of our knowledge on how things might be in the universe based on our singular planet's path of evolution.
It makes it truly hard to think of what alternative life forms may exist.
Star trek-ish idea of massive cooperation between species is desperately naive though. Its secondary-school level of hand-holding and singing kumbayah around fire, and yet it still couldn't evade massive wars that sometimes wiped out entire civilizations.
Lockstep evolution is extremely improbable. Even 1000 years head start is massive, a more realistic one would be tens of millions of years or more.
The space is finite, so is Milky way. Eventually, even if its far in the future, species will compete for resources and energy. The smarter ones realize that problems are easier solved as soon as possible, and we have dark forest stuff. Mankind is slowly also inching in that realization. We should work hard on improving ourselves massively and spreading out before caring whats out there. I simply can't imagine a realistic scenario where there won't be some immediate attack, ie speeding up some very dark asteroid into relativistic speeds, aimed at Earth.
Also, why should xenophoby, racism and similar perks be available only to humanity. Even we can see how deeply flawed creatures we are.
>Star trek-ish idea of massive cooperation between species is desperately naive though. Its secondary-school level of hand-holding and singing kumbayah around fire, and yet it still couldn't evade massive wars that sometimes wiped out entire civilizations.
Indeed, I simply hate losing my sense of whimsy in these discussions because anything is still possible. Though realistically, yes, its worse odds than pretty much any other possibility. No disputing that.
>The space is finite, so is Milky way. Eventually, even if its far in the future, species will compete for resources and energy. The smarter ones realize that problems are easier solved as soon as possible.
Is space not ever expanding? My entire conceptualized version of what space (as in outer space) is that its always expanding, we actually have zero idea where the edges of the actual universe are, or if they even exist beyond theorizing. It may be the ultimate in lending itself to more cooperation than conflict as a result, since new resources are indefinitely being created.
Then again, if you believe expansion is constrained only to the Milky Way Galaxy (I don't see why it has to be, if we can colonize an entire galaxy I feel strongly at that point the technology for intergalactic travel exists at the same time, so we can finally see whats up in the Backward Galaxy[0]). Given this constraint, expansion over time will lead to issues inevitably but who's to say it couldn't be resolved in different capacities? Perhaps even civilizations have a natural apex expansion size (IE, its not actually infinite) and that creates natural growth boundaries. Since we aren't even a galactic species yet, we don't know how that would shape out in reality.
>and we have dark forest stuff
Or we simply don't know what stage other civilizations are in, or if they exist at all (though statistically, I've been told by people who absolutely know more than I do on multiple occasions its extremely unlikely there isn't some form of extraterrestrial life that would roughly resemble plants and animals but civilization is far less guaranteed)
We could actually be the most advanced (imagine that, it seems wild to me, but it is one possible), or it could be that indeed, it may follow the Dark Forest[1] hypothesis).
>We should work hard on improving ourselves massively and spreading out before caring whats out there. I simply can't imagine a realistic scenario where there won't be some immediate attack, ie speeding up some very dark asteroid into relativistic speeds, aimed at Earth.
I agree with the massive expansion, I don't think it should come at the entire expense of understanding what may be out there also, but in terms of resource allocation, expansion should have been paramount since the 1960s at least, IMO.
Eventually this rock, one way or another, will reach its inevitable peak and as a species we would do well to be spread around.
I don't know that we are guaranteed to be attacked. It makes alot of assumptions about how civilization evolves that is very human centric, but it is in fact the only model we have so I can't blame anyone for adopting it without question, but there always exists the possibility that there are other models of evolution that are less conflict driven and promote cooperation
>Also, why should xenophoby, racism and similar perks be available only to humanity. Even we can see how deeply flawed creatures we are.
In the same vain of this, why shouldn't they be? What purpose do those ideas even serve? They're not evolutionary constructs, they're cultural / societal ones created to justify oppressing one group of humans by another. Another civilization could have simply made better choices and evolved on a planet that trended toward cooperation and not conflict.
We only understand our version of how evolution trends, it doesn't make it law of the universe until we actually can study other non-human civilizations.
It kind of is. You're thinking directionality, but there's also the fact that optimal transmission will involve using compression and possibly encryption, which by its nature turns the signal into noise if you don't already know it's a signal. An optimal signal, which it seems reasonable to assume would be what aliens would be using by the time they're communicating across star systems, would be much more difficult to detect as a signal than something like an FM radio station, which puts a lot of energy into broadcasting a carrier that is there even if the station is transmitting total silence.
You're forgetting the Contact method where the actual signal is buried in a beacon signal. The beacon signal is very much a "primitive" non-random not noise signal...primes. Now that you've recorded enough of that beacon signal, someone analyses each of the pulses to realize there's a message embedded within. This way, you don't need a response to know someone go it. When they magically show up in the machine you've sent the plans as that message, you'll know the message was received.
This presumes they have the same nasty survival-of-the-fittest kill-or-be-killed attitude as humanity. Our evolution kinda created that but it doesn't have to apply everywhere. I think it's entirely possible that alien civilisations could exist that are a lot more symbiotic.
We have a saying in Holland "the innkeeper trusts his guests like himself" which seems to apply here.
>Our evolution kinda created that but it doesn't have to apply everywhere.
Presumably any alien species was also shaped by evolution, so is also likely to be similarly competitive. Maybe you can escape your evolutionary past. But maybe not.
I would hope so, but this whole situation reminds me of a quote from the writer William S. Burroughs: "This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games."
It is a bleak view. When I even think about the behaviors of some of the animals (e.g. seals, praying mantises) we share existence with, it seems like it could be accurate. On the positive side, the concept of the infinite game (e.g. culture) is what should give us hope.
It doesn't even apply in this world. There are many examples of a more advanced civilization steamrolling a simpler one, but there are also examples of that not happening. It's by no means an inevitability.
Again the concept of sport imposes human concepts on a hypothetical alien culture.
There's no reason to assume their society would have developed along similar lines. I'm sure there's alien civilisations that are more aggressive than us, but also ones that are less so.
I don't think we'll ever meet any though as our lifespan is just so short on a universal scale. And FTL travel seems to be impossible otherwise we'd have seen signs of it.
Of course according to our current physics understanding it is also impossible but I don't think humanity is very smart yet. But this thing might be right.
>the concept of sport imposes human concepts on a hypothetical alien culture.
Many animals like cats do it. Its not a human concept but one from superior smarter predators which should occur regardless from what planet they are.
The greater the differences in intelligence and power the easier it is to justify cruelty.
I do think it's less likely because to actually travel space they would need to be so technologically advanced that we simply wouldn't be worth fighting or destroying. Maybe studying which could be cruel in its own way.
> I'm sure there's alien civilisations that are more aggressive than us, but also ones that are less so.
What is the minimum amount of aggression necessary to evolve sentience? What is the maximum amount of aggression in an interstellar space-faring species? Where is humanity on that scale?
A super-aggressive species would likely self-annihilate before possessing sufficient energy to travel interstellar distances... So the jury's still out on us.
> And FTL travel seems to be impossible otherwise we'd have seen signs of it.
What signs? Projects like LIGO that measure gravitational waves are still measuring cataclysmic collisions of ultra massive bodies. Maybe once the detector is good enough to detect exoplanets and smaller objects we can start drawing some conclusions.
I don’t believe FTL is possible, but on the off chance that it is, we’d be so deep into technology-as-magic territory that any speculation on detectability is totally pointless.
Your are reasoning like a 15th century conquistador with spaceships.
> Any kind of contact will ends up in abysmal disaster as we have seen in the past, when advanced civilization shown up on shores of less advanced one.
Interstellar travel is mind-boggingly difficult and expensive. Even assuming 100% fuel-efficiency, it is basically impossible to conquer other worlds, and doing so would come at zero benefits for the homeworld, as anything that could be brought back from conquered exoplanets could be made for far cheaper and faster at home. Atoms are the same everywhere in the galaxy, no planet has any unique stuff that is valuable enough that is makes sense to haul it across the galaxy.
The one thing that is cheap to trade is information, so why not cooperate with everyone? Competition is useless as we've seen, so why not give away everything we know in exchange for everything they know?
We could give them everything what we know and they could give us back a relativistic kill missile. No reason to try to conquer a planet if you can just extinguish a protentional threat, which luckily was naive to be useful before extinguishing.
Your comment just reminded me of a sci-fi novel called Roadside Picnic that I learned about on a different thread. Just because of that idea where aliens could come across us and not pay us any attention in the same way that a human might ignore an ant.
Yeah but they would need to transfer for a long enough time to be noticed and decoded by the other side, so it would easy to spot and eliminate them quickly. Unless they are a smart cult and managed to make some self unpacking and executing coding which they could send over radio.
Time is a factor here. How close in time and space would be them?
If we get something coming from more than 100 light years away we might not have the technology to respond, and if we do it may not matter anyway if we are at risk of not having a technological civilization anymore 100-200 years forward. So the meaningful actions on those cases may not include answering back.
Then it will be the actual use of that message. Lets assume that we will decide that is a signal from a civilization that is out there. It will be a signal meant for us and for any other civilization that doesn't have the knowledge/culture level as them, meant for giving us a common ground for communicating back, or it will be something that just will tell us that someone intelligent is out there, but no mean to understand it?
So the options are that we find apparently benevolent aliens willing to contact us, or that we find out that someone is out there but no way to communicate/reach them. I think the second scenario is the most probable one, and how our civilization will react if widely enough will change with time, novelty at first and indifference a few years later.
I cannot imagine any scenario where we're just 100-200 years away from "no more tech" that isn't purely total nuclear destruction. Even then, we'd probably be so close to getting back to a technological civilization that it'd be a blip in the radar at best if we're talking about a society that far away.
We lost 150 years of progress? That's okay, we had 800 more years to advance before the aliens showed up or whatever.
It's such a weird thing I see so many people assuming. We were down to like 16,000 humans on Earth at one point, and that was before we'd developed things that you could theoretically scavenge and jumpstart your tech.
People need to stop doomscrolling; I'm certain this is depression projected.
When we have a nuclear destruction, and some of us survive, then we will have a problem which we cannot solve easily even today: absolute annihilation of the ozone layer. It won’t be a soft reset at all. If the ozone layer disappeared right now, its consequences would be absolutely catastrophic even with the current civilization completely intact.
With all due respect, I don't think you understand what the "worst case" scenario looks like for global warming, and how close we are to that scenario. For reference, check out figure 1 in this nature article [1].
That has warming by 2300 as 8C in an "emissions continue current trends" path.
Here's chatgpt giving a picture of what 8C warming looks like. Speculative, hallucinations, caveat emptor, etc...but to give a sense of proportion this, last time the earth was 8C *cooler* than now, ice covered 25% of the planet:
> At +8°C, Earth is fundamentally transformed. Large parts of today’s populated zones—South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, southern Europe, the southern U.S.—are functionally uninhabitable for humans outdoors. Wet-bulb temperatures regularly exceed survivable limits. Agriculture collapses across the subtropics; even mechanized, climate-controlled farming is marginal. Most of the world’s food comes from high-latitude regions: a narrow band across northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia. Sea levels are dozens of meters higher, drowning coastal megacities; Miami, New York, Shanghai, and London are gone. Phoenix is lifeless desert. Seattle is coastal tundra, wetter but still survivable.
> Civilization persists only in fragments. Mass migration and resource wars have rewritten borders. Population is a fraction of 21st-century levels. Global trade, universities, and modern governance are mostly memories. Local, self-sufficient polities dominate. The United States as an institution likely dissolves or transforms beyond recognition—2 out of 10 chance of recognizable survival. Harvard or MIT survive, if at all, as digital archives or autonomous AI-driven knowledge systems—3 out of 10. The world would still have people and culture, but not civilization as we know it.
Edit: I would appreciate knowing why I'm getting downvoted when I added citations for *possible* warming paths (from nature!). Yes, the chatgpt explanation is speculative but I mean, look at the thread we're discussing.
I appreciated your comment. I’ll also note that the path to that future will not be fun - you/chatgpt describe a kind of end state 275 years away, but things will evolve to that state over time. I suspect the downvotes may reflect people’s desire not to face the likely reality.
In Carl Sagan's Cosmos, he talks about how many advanced civilizations could be out there capable of radio astronomy, and how as in our own experience, we have the capability to wipe out own civilization, so that would also be a factor in other advanced civilizations and could act as a limiting factor. There are many such factors other than nuclear destruction that could impact all functioning of an advanced society, rendering it nonviable.
The idea has nothing to do with "doom scrolling". Go watch some Cosmos...
Electrification of transportation is already well underway. Obviously ships and planes will lag behind, and may even be forced to use biofuels if we run out of fossil fuels, but the idea that the world will stop when we run out is outdated.
Green power generation is also making huge strides forward, and battery technology is improving enough to make fully green grids a reality. We already see articles about how some countries are managing to go entire days without burning any fossil fuels for power generation. This will increase over time despite what the doomsayers predict. We aren't there yet, but the progress is almost inevitable.
The bigger problem is that we've already burned so much fossil fuel that we are noticeably altering the climate. This is going to cause a lot of stresses in the future, especially in a post-collapse scenario.
They’re going days without burning fossil fuels by using high tech solar panels and windmills and such. What happens when they stop being made and they eventually break down? You’ll have to bootstrap tech again but without low-tech sources of concentrated energy. Electrified transport is great today, useless two hundred years ago.
We mined all of the easily accessible drywall gypsum too, I guess we wouldn't be able to have houses either and would have to live outside in the cold and rain!
There are lots of other building materials available. What other sources of energy are there which are suitable for driving a new industrial revolution if you’re starting over? Wind and solar aren’t worth too much without high tech to enable them. Biomass is insufficient. Nuclear needs high tech. Hydro could do, but it’s pretty limiting.
Thankfully, unless somehow everything manmade disappears, we'll have scraps of windmills, solar panels, and hydro electric generators - with that laying around, it's easy to eventually figure out the underlying concepts and rebuild them.
> So the options are that we find apparently benevolent aliens willing to contact us, or that we find out that someone is out there but no way to communicate/reach them. I think the second scenario is the most probable one
I hope the second scenario is the most probable. Any aliens that could contact us would already know we can't even get along with each other, much less them. Even the most benevolent of aliens should see us as a "problem". (I was going to say "threat" but who am I kidding.)
Well now that Beatriz Villarroels paper on transient objects in orbit prior to our space programs has been through the peer review process and has been published, what if we framed the question as "What do we do if the non human intelligence was already here"
former chairman of the board of the SETI Institute John Gertz:
'In fact, the author has heard from serious U.S. SETI researchers that they are convinced that “men in black suits” will appear at their laboratory door the moment a detection is confirmed.'
This seems like romanticizing. I don’t get the impression that maintaining a constant watch on SETI researchers is something any intelligence agency is incentivized to do.
As it sounds like you know, it would be great if you can articulate the boundaries of a prototypical intelligence agency mandate. Because then it should be a cinch to describe why ‘communication from a foreign power of as-yet indeterminate technology advancment relative to
modern day superpowers to (checks notes) members of any of the 200 some odd nation-states on the planet who can afford operating a radio telescope’ doesn’t fall within that mandate
I'd expect them to monitor SETI to intercept any first contacts the same amount as they monitor Miss Cleo to make sure her crystal ball isn't showing state secrets.
And yet no one is ever able to describe what agency or jurisdiction these "men in black suits" will work for.
This basically is just demonstrating how people very very good in their field can still fail Civics 101. Men In Black were some funny movies back in the day, but they were just movies.
Though I feel this is fairly lazily written, it does have a basic premise I've seen before.
I read an article about post cold war US society. Basically, from 1989-2001 the United States was in a transition period that culminated with the first opportunity to seize on a "universal bad" (terrorism) because the USSR filled the role so readily for so long, US society was set adrift with partisan factions that couldn't find a common enemy to get behind in times of internal struggle.
That is the gist of the article, sub USSR for aliens and all of humanity for US society and you have the same basic outline
In the end, I kinda... don't care. Look up - there's nothing. There should be at least some alien civilizations trying to make their presence known. There should be some signs somewhere that could be recognized universally as either "stay away" or "come here". It really should be trivial to locate technological civilizations unless you've got some incredibly solid reason as to why EVERY SINGLE ALIEN CIVILIZATION IN THE UNIVERSE acts a certain way. Color me doubtful.
We have billions and billions of data points showing the Universe is empty. We have exactly one (1) data point showing it isn't. And that's us.
Besides, just look at the timeline. The universe has only been cool enough, with enough stable stars, with enough formed planets for potential life to form for a few billion years. Between that and the Drake equation, life alone is likely to be unreasonably uncommon. Life that forms after a planet becomes stable, doesn't have any planet-altering disasters, evolves to complex multicellular forms, evolves some kind of intelligence, becomes social, forms a society, advances technology, and starts exploring the universe...? Why bother? The math doesn't work.
Note: I'm not speaking about any KIND of life existing, I'm speaking about technological civilizations. My belief is that we are essentially the forerunners.
When you look up remember that the majority of what you see is in the same sub-arm of the spiral arm of the milky way that we are in. Of those we can see a large number or binary systems - two stars orbiting each other. We fancy telescopes we can see a lot more of course.
All the power of stars, and most of them still are not powerful enough that we can see them even on a dark night! What chance does any alien have of sending a message that reaches us if the light from their star isn't even powerful enough to be easy to detect? It was suggested elsewhere that even if we find an alien, we probably cannot respond if they are more than 100 light years away just because we can't get a message out powerful enough that they can detect (I can't verify this claim but it is reasonable)
It's probably worth considering that across a sufficiently large distance, they effectively no longer exist. Their signals haven't reached you, and with the increasing speed of the universe's expansion, they will never reach you. Eventually, everything will be expanding at well beyond the speed of light, so short of being able to cut through space and time, we're not reaching any of these destinations. For all intents and purposes, they don't exist for us. We'll never see any evidence, nor could we ever see any evidence.
So in reality, there is a maximum distance we need to consider - the distance where any signal would have any chance of reaching a detectable region.
But besides, this still misses the most important part. Until 10 billion years ago, stars were much too big and poor in metals and unstable. We didn't have an earth until 5 billion years ago. It was inhospitable to life for a LONG time. We've only had multicellular organisms of any kind for 800M years. Our star is unusually calm, meaning we don't have to worry about being bleached every 5 million years or whatever.
I've said this a couple times in this conversation, but the best guess is honestly that we're the forerunners.
I have no doubt that civilizations are out there. Maybe a handful, maybe nearing infinity. But out there.
The problem is "out there" is so far away, we are all isolated on our own island worlds. An ocean of space so vast we cannot meaningfully traverse it with probes or radio, to say nothing of manned interstellar flight.
But it never gets boring for me to imagine what other civilizations there might be, and how they might be different from us and from each other.
We've been to the moon. There are no machines. We've been to Mars (via machines). There are no civilizations. We've seen the orbits of thousands of planets which are absolutely too hot for any biological processes to synthesize. We've scanned countless stars and determined them to be too unstable for anything to survive in their orbit. We've looked into every single confusing thing in the universe we could find and have seen natural explanations for nearly every single phenomenon.
Do you think we just don't know anything about the universe? There is tons of evidence of absence. It might not be complete enough to make a guess yet, and that's a fine argument to make, but it's weird to pretend that the evidence doesn't exist.
edit: And again, while it's not evidence of absence, I'm still waiting for a galactic signpost to pop up somewhere. Unless you've got some explanation for why not one single civilization anywhere, even ones which have left their home planet and have nothing too serious to worry about with respect to retaliation?
Probably thousands of years from now, but I do wonder when people will stop using "the universe is too vast to know anything" as an excuse. We've still got people pretending the ocean is an enormous, occluded mystery.
In all seriousness, I think if we did receive something, it would be classified immediately, and the government, or governments, will move very swiftly with a heavy hand to silence the discovery. At the very least until they know exactly what it is, what it is conveying, and how to respond.
That said, I think that if it got out, a lot of people would absolutely lose their snot. Completely. It would be chaos in some places.
Ha, or, perhaps for a 2025 variant: it would quickly be shared publicly by government scientists (who are not as secretive or good at keeping secrets as the public seems to think!), the evidence all shared publicly, subject to international peer review and consensus. And then 70% of people would believe it's made-up. The US-sphere would believe China made it up as a plot (or "globalists") and the developing world and BRICS would believe the US made it up as a plot. Western countries would repeatedly sign and then remove themselves from international treaties to prepare for contact.
Bit too on the nose, maybe, but a heck of a lot more likely than a coverup by government scientists.
People would simply not believe it. I don’t think there is world where aliens messaging is taken seriously on earth (at scale). People would attribute it to the military.
>That said, I think that if it got out, a lot of people would absolutely lose their snot. Completely. It would be chaos in some places.
It would definitely be the most important discovery ever made and would move some billions of dollars, but realistically I think people would just carry on with their lives (assuming physical contact with them is impossible in a lifetime).
I think there were be the usual bunch of weirdos that predict the end of the world for Thursday, and then the other significant batch of weirdos who will quickly explain it with their religion of choice.
After some ohhhs and ahhhhs we would switch to the next thing.
The moot question isn't what will happen after Earth receives and confirms an alien signal.
The question is moot, because any alien species advanced enough to send directed signals across solar systems, can and will reach, overwhelm and subsume Earth with ease, once we Earthlings manage to contact such aliens.
And if such events happened in the past, that might explain a few interesting notions we humans tend to have.
"Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God."
~Shermer's last law
But what if that was their intention from the very beginning? What if Earth itself is just yet another alien farm?
What if Earth's beautiful and bountiful life (flora and fauna) was the result of terraforming, by aliens, but indirectly using spores tacked onto cosmic flying objects (comets, meteors, asteroids) that they knew will cross such solar systems and crash into inhabitable planets on some not so random chance?
Abiogenesis is the emergence of life from nonliving organics. It is the leading theory regarding how life spawned on Earth, but it is being questioned due to recent evidence.
Conditions for Life:
For life to exist, certain conditions must be met. These include:
* Presence of Water: Essential for biochemical reactions.
* Organic Compounds: Building blocks like carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen are crucial.
* Energy Source: Sunlight or geothermal energy can drive life processes.
Evidence and Research:
While no definitive evidence of extraterrestrial life has been found, scientists continue to explore environments on other planets, such as Mars and Europa, which may harbor conditions suitable for life. The study of extremophiles on Earth—organisms that thrive in harsh conditions—provides insights into how life might exist elsewhere in the universe
One prominent theory regarding the extraterrestrial origin of life is Panspermia.
The Panspermia Hypothesis suggests that life, or the building blocks of life, may have been transported to Earth via comets, asteroids, or space dust.
There are several forms of panspermia:
* Naturalistic Panspermia:
Life evolves on another planet and is ejected into space, eventually landing on Earth.
* Directed Panspermia:
Intelligent beings from another planet intentionally send life to Earth.
* Intelligent Design Panspermia:
Life is designed and seeded by extraterrestrial intelligences.
I believe Earth life is the result of Natural Panspermia. But if SETI or other observatories detect and confirm alien signal, then Directed Panspermia might be our origin.
> The question is moot, because any alien species advanced enough to send directed signals across solar systems, can and will reach, overwhelm and subsume Earth with ease, once we Earthlings manage to contact such aliens.
Not possible if our scientific understanding of c is accurate.
I don't care how many episodes of ST you've binged; warp speed is just fantasy.
Is possible, and easy if one accelerates at 1 G for half the trip, then decelerates at 1 G for half the trip. Conventional nuclear fission AND fusion rocket engines, like NERVA, already exist and are flight-certified. 1 light year could be traveled in 2 pilot years.
What is SciFi today may become the reality in the future.
The iconic flip-type TriCorder telecommunicator of Star Trek, became the inspiration of the world's first portable cellular phone (first of which was the DynaTac, quickly followed by MicroTac and StarTac (world's first portable flip phone, and yup, that name is not a coincidence)) by Motorola (more famous iteration later as the iconic Moto Razr). Motorola engineer Martin Cooper said that watching Captain Kirk using his communicator on the television show Star Trek inspired him with a stunning idea -- to develop a handheld mobile phone.
Did you know that Radar was invented during experiments with radio waves for "Death Ray Gun" weaponry? A
death ray is a theoretical particle beam or electromagnetic weapon that gained popularity in science fiction during the 1920s and 1930s after inventors like Nikola Tesla claimed to have developed one. British scientists, asked to evaluate the feasibility of a radio-wave "death ray gun" (supposedly being developed by the Nazis) finally concluded it was impossible, but realized the same principles could be used for aircraft detection.
Galileo was jailed (put under house arrest, till he died of ill health) for his "blasphemous" statements concerning Heliocentricity, etc., but ancient Hindus have known and documented (in their Vedic texts) about Multiverse, Observer Effect, Illusory nature of Reality (e.g., modern science confirms that touch is an illusion of reality, we really cannot touch anything: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TDgey6g65X0) , and fundamentals of mathematics and science since thousands of years, many centuries or millennia before such concepts became understood and accepted by Western scientists or theorists.
Human flight was considered an impossible fantasy, until the Wright Brothers made it a reality.
Space flight was unproven until the Soviets made it a reality.
Did you know that scientists estimated the mass of all matter and all energy of this Universe, but they believe it accounts only for 5% of the content of the Universe? The remaining 95% of this Universe is unknown, but scientists believe it to be comprised of anti-matter and anti-energy, which are not yet understood properly by modern science. SciFi concept, this may seem, but that's the prevailing scientific theory.
Now think about this idea.. What if an advanced alien species, were made of anti-matter and using anti-energy? Would their technology obey the laws of physics as our modern science understands? Would they be able to travel across the galaxy faster than we humans deem possible with our limited understanding of how the Universe works?
'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', according to Arthur C. Clarke's third law.
I couldn't imagine worshipping aliens even if they were powerful enough to be indistinguishable from gods.
I also think that if such powerful aliens (or actual gods for that matter) were to exist, they wouldn't give a rat's ass about whether we worship them. Because we'd have nothing to offer them. It's like us stepping on ants without thinking about it. Their world is so limited it's meaningless to us. If any gods existed we'd be the same to them.
In any case my intuition will always be to fight hostile authorities, even if its futile. I would never be able to be in the military for example.
The aliens, if they exist, will certainly powerful enough to destroy humanity's paltry defenses (and our satellites will be first to fall during an alien invasion), but you are right, they won't bother negotiating or defeating us, they will simply annihilate humanity (via biological weaponry, perhaps), terraform this beautiful bountiful Earth to suit their needs, and use it as they deem fit.
For all of humanity's much vaunted intelligence, we really haven't bothered to unitedly plan for any threats from space, natural or otherwise.
If advanced alien beings did visit Earth in the past, they could be easily have become worshipped as Gods by the humans of that time.
Earth is such a tiny speck in the vast emptiness of space, that unless galaxy colonising aliens are capable of traveling in spaceships at FTL (faster than light) speeds, it may indeed take them hundreds or thousands or millions of years to pass by Earth again on their next sweep through the Goldilocks planets in their terraforming list in this corner of the Universe.
Send memes. Most commenters here assume receiving a message means aliens can reach us - they can't. Think about how distant the closest galaxy is and think about how long it would take to reach them even at light speed. The size of the ship needed, the amount of fuel needed not only for acceleration but stopping as well. Even if they 100x or 1000x our space abilities, it would still be impossible.
It also assumes that it is nearby aliens. Our radio transmissions have only gone 100 light years, and probably not detectable beyond a few. But the aliens could be saying hello to everyone from thousand light years away.
It also could not be a message. I think we have ruled out nearby Dyson Swarm (as in thousands of light years), but we could find one in rest of our galaxy or even Andromeda. Dyson Swarms should be noticeably weird infrared stars.
It is also quite possible that we never decode their message. Even with one designed to be decoded, their thinking could be too different.
Or they could just pop up here because they have mastered quantum physics and can just use quantum tunnelling to teleport whole ship across space in an instant.
We can make it so it's never aliens, or always aliens. Public and science opinion has become a free for all lately.
People are so caught up in the 3I/ATLAS stuff, for example. Should we beam a message to it? What should we think of it? It's a circus.
Let's go back to Boyajian's Star instead. Can we really be sure the dimming is not caused by a mothership coming from that direction? It explains everything, right? Maybe that's how they communicate, by sending a paper plane and opening a large occlusion origami that says "we come from this general direction" (I'm cosplaying Avi Loeb here, satirically).
There's something about interpretation in all of this. Space is full of radio signals. We determine lots of them to be natural (with good reason).
I'm afraid proposing "we should answer" (in case of electromagnetic signals) could lead to a scenario in which people are encouraged to believe something without the means to verifying it. Some idiot group could do it just to increase the popular optimism about space in order to induce a favorable perception on the development of space technologies with the ultimate goal of just bumping some industry with money. It's the kind of world we live in right now, unfortunatelly.
If we want to be serious about humanity's place in the universe, first we need to be serious about our home right here. I don't think we're mature enough to have responsible control over technologies that could be used to send a powerful signal into space.
I think Avi knows what he's doing, and he wants other scientists to dismiss him in public, so he gets an audience.
However, there is a chance he could be underestimating that audience, or at least part of it.
Finding a new type of comet is a scientific breakthrough, and I think his work points in that direction (still a guess from him though, but an educated one). He is trying to cake up those potential genuine discovers with sloppy sensacionalist makeup on top, and that's why I call it a circus.
If in a few months we confirm that 3I/ATLAS is a new kind of comet, he could use the papers he wrote to say he found evidence of that new type first, and also described its landmark characteristics. It would "legitimize" him. But the alien stuff would probably continue to be garbage. He can then say the scientists were skeptics, but he was right.
Now, what angle the aliens narrative serve? Why would a scientist subject himself to being a clown? I don't exactly know. In his case, I don't think it's good stuff.
I chose Tabby's Star to satirize him because my description of a mothership deploying an origami-like occluder matches the overall conclusion from the research at the time (a disturbed exomoon). It's an object from that system that changed is shape. In fact, "disturbed exosatellite" and "unfolding mothership from a planet" are quite compatible descriptions. What matters here is epistemology (we can't know if it's natural or not). Also, it's a good demonstration that we (general public non-astronomers) don't need his antics to imagine things.
I've always thought that the public reaction to aliens in Contact was precisely, painfully accurate. Panic, cults, religions, the typical human response to something huge, unknown, and unknowable.
You should see the movie Don't Look Up. It is even more painfully accurate portrayal of our times, and it eeriely explains why the world's richest men are building and testing rockets and spaceships. (Answer: No, it ain't merely for space tourism or mere profits. They know their misdeeds will ruin the Earth one day, so they are preparing a Plan B.)
The movie Don't Look Up is still an apt metaphor, because the variable (how the apocalypse will happen) may change, but the outcome won't.
The same richest elites that refuse to acknowledge and do anything to revert climate change, will do nothing (except try to escape Earth in spaceships) if and when any humanity detects and anticipates any Earth destroying apocalypse inducer (asteroid/meteor or extreme solar flare) from out of the depths of space.
To a more naive, metaphor-blind audience, your mention of Don't Look Up makes it look like the scientists are warning about an alien comet and I'm the one ignoring it.
I'm very familiar with apocalyptical narratives of all kinds, but what I'm approaching here is much different. I'm talking about the integrity of scientific endeavours. In particular, space exploration endeavours.
Earth has a number of very high power semi directional transmitters operating. By this I mean the assorted 50 hertz and 60 hertz AC power systems. These are coherent in areas because there are separated adjacent systems that act to isolate them. These are long in wavelength at about 3000 miles and will penetrate the ionosphere via capacitance. If we had a long wave receiver in orbit past the earth, it could listen on an incrementally varying wavelength from 25 hertz to ~~300 hertz for any similarly radiating civilisation. This radiation would be reduced by square law spreading, but a phase locked loop receiver that gradually scanned this frequency space should be able to detect such radiation out to 100-500 light years. The PLL listens for a long integrating interval, and then steps to the next frequency. The antenna can be tuned to cover the 25 Hz to 300 Hz spectrum by use of mechanically adjustable loading coils. Such an antenna could be a simple long wire that is gravitationally solar stabilised so it would sweep annually. A similar one could be earth centered to enable sweeps at it's far from earth orbit much faster than annually? This is a project that Elon Musk could easily perform and it might get us a Nobel? if we found anything? It would sit there and sieve data in hope of success?
Not sure. Can some of HN at least agree that if it's the Empire we all join and act as if we love serving the Emperor and then put subtle code in the planet killing weapons that overload and self destruct if pointed at human listed planets?
If survival is key in that regard, then we'd probably be encouraged to spread/cohabit with other species' planets so that the target is more fuzzy.
Earth might still be at risk, but never underestimate the human ability to sell large tracts of land to foreign investors in exchange for a few concessions.
The Catholic church answered this question ages ago. I assume the other major religions did too. It's really not concerning at all to the institution; the major problem would be with people who don't actually understand their own religion.
Granted, this would be a lot of people, but I think it'd be a midrange of "kinda religious, but not enough to dive in"-types who are mostly freaking out over the revelation.
So, how does the story go? Only earth is blessed by god, because Jesus crashed here, and all the alien races are toast because they didn’t have a chance to learn about Christ, Savior of the strange bipeds from Earth?
I’m sure they came up with an elaborate story how Jesus loves sentient mollusks from Alpha Centauri, but I hope most people are smart enough to realise how little sense it all makes. I for one am curious how this plays out, if I’m lucky enough to witness it.
Check out: "UFO, End Times Delusion" as an example of a fundie take on extra terrestrials. A bit old now, not sure if they've updated it, but it's the kind of stuff I was raised in in the 80s/90s.
tl;dr Humans were first and most important, but if you're omnipotent and building an ant farm, it's logical to provide a nearly infinite number of things to interest and enrich your creations. If there are other creatures, and they're given a rational soul, they were also made aware of God's existence.
At the end of the day, the Catholics (at least) don't believe they were given full knowledge of the universe at some arbitrary point in the past. Instead, we were plopped into it and expected to explore and understand it. This will require us to occasionally update our teachings - just like how scientists need to update their teachings when they discover they didn't understand something before.
It's unbelievably obnoxious to simply assume everyone who doesn't scoff at religion simply isn't "smart enough". You clearly haven't taken much time to understand the topic if you can't come up with even one good argument. Even Richard Dawkins is able to connect with religious logic to a degree.
Note that I didn’t refer to religion as a whole, but the combination of Catholicism and sentient alien life in particular. I am definitely able to sympathise with believing in a kind of architect giving it all a sense of meaning, even if I don’t share that notion. But desperate attempts of wringing a somewhat coherent argument out of texts written for a feudal society millennia ago? That’s just coping.
Oh, then sure, I won't argue with you there. It's up to you at that point to find the arguments convincing or not.
I think the idea of Imago Dei is actually the most believable part. I am absolutely convinced that we're the forerunners of this universe. The first scenario where a creation becomes aware of its creator - even if I'm imagining the wrong architect.
It would depend a lot on what the alien species was like.
If they go "oh yeah Religion, that's a quirk of your biology, don't worry you will outgrow it in time" then yeah, that's problematic.
If they go "Oh, you say that the savior Jesus Christ was a human? That answers one of our biggest questions. The story never made much sense before. Boy, those Angels must be pretty freaky looking for you then." then that's entirely different.
IMO a protocol that doesn't involve automated instantaneous backing up of data on a publicly-referenceable blockchain is worthless due to the apparently legitimate (in the eyes SETI researchers that a former SETI institute chairman references) concern about security services quietly stepping in the way.
For a somber, deeply intellectual view of what could happen, I can't recommend enough Stanislaw Lem's His Master's Voice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Master%27s_Voice_%28novel%...
"Given that our civilization is unable to assimilate well even those concepts that originate in human heads when they appear outside its main current, although the creators of those concepts are, after all, children of the same age—how could we have assumed that we would be capable of understanding a civilization totally unlike ours, if it addressed us across the cosmic gulf?"
Me and my dog cannot talk.
I understand my dog and he understands me.
If they experience death then we have massive common ground already.
I've never bought Wittgenstein's Lion for similar reasons. I am able to communicate with my cat, though it is not easy. We don't need language to do this.
It is also important to note that understanding is not equal. Certainly I understand my cat far better than she understands me. Famously Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish are mutually intelligible[0], yet this does not create equal understanding between all parties. Norwegians fair the best while Swedes are out of luck. It probably isn't surprising that this happens even when all speakers are speaking the same language. You can speak in front of 10 people and you may hear 15 different interpretations, none need be what you intended.
Language is messy. It's incredible communication happens with it. But we're smart creatures, and there's ways to establish frames of reference. We have theory of mind, even if we don't all use it. But using it certainly helps. Communication is best when all parties are trying their best to understand one another. Sometimes we confuse that to mean we're trying because we're talking. You're not trying unless you're considering what was intended to be said, despite the words used. To which, that, I agree is the lion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_Danish,_Norwegia...
Humans and dogs have evolved together to be cooperative…
would you feel common ground with a predatory fish? Or a plant? An insect colony?
We all share many similar biological imperatives And these contrived examples because we all evolved on the same planet. Even the worst case scenario of the Dark Forest has many anthropomorphic priors within.
Imagine an intelligent shade of blue. Thank you, Douglas Adams. I suspect we have no idea WTF is out there and I'm not a carbon chauvinist like Carl Sagan was. But I wish I would have lived long enough to find out and I suspect that won't be the case.
> Thank you, Douglas Adams
actually, hp lovecraft
> Imagine an intelligent shade of blue
A finite intelligence, willing to talk across the galaxy, talking in finite sequences, using engineering and maths?
I'm sure there's a lot of universal aprioris
There's also a lot of "universals" that people take for granted as universal when it really isn't universal.
Things off the top of my head that humans usually take for granted as "universals":
- Separation of memory and DNA. What if memories were stored in DNA and can be passed between individuals?
- Inability to share memories. What if memories can be passed around like semen and sweat?
- Inability to easily read others' minds. What if kissing/touching someone would share all of each others' thoughts? How would that alien society develop differently?
- Existence of the ego. What if they live in a constant state of ego death, like some humans on certain drugs?
- Separation of the id and the superego. This is... one way to solve an alignment problem, I suppose. Imagine a species which replaced their sense of hunger/sexual craving, with a craving for morality. And they execute creatures like humans when they see a human do anything immoral, such as eating an ice cream when it can reduce your lifespan and thus deprive your children of a parent, or deprive your society of tax dollars.
- And many other possible examples that i can come up with that exists within human "thoughtspace", let alone concepts that do not exist within human thoughtspace
How would you feel if you met an alien species that communicates by raping their children? If that sounds weird to you, what if they can communicate via the DNA in sperm, so it'd be somewhat similar to how human sex transmits information from the human male to the human female?
> - Existence of the ego. What if they live in a constant state of ego death, like some humans on certain drugs?
> .. And they execute creatures like humans when they see a human do anything immoral
You will enjoy reading: https://www.ishtar-collective.net/entries/the-wager
> - And many other possible examples that i can come up with that exists within human "thoughtspace", let alone concepts that do not exist within human thoughtspace
And this: https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub / https://www.amazon.com/There-No-Antimemetics-Division-Novel/...
Actually, I was explicitly thinking of SCP-3125 there.
> would you feel common ground with a predatory fish?
The fish needs to eat, I need to eat. The fish has the drive to procreate, so do I, or at least I have a sex drive.
> Or a plant?
We both need sunlight to live, we both require a breathable atmosphere. We both need water.
> An insect colony?
Much of the above applies here as well, in addition to that I can see similarities between a large insect colony and our large cities, how things move, how roads and buildings are adjusted for efficiencies, how bad actors can harm the system.
Yes, I can see common ground between myself and all three of those things you listed.
Not the parent comment but what's your point? You can't use that common ground for anything, let alone communication, can you?. The fish wants to fuck? You want to too, what now? How do you stablish a common ground to understanding based on such things?
Pertinent here is that said fish has done something notable enough to have been discovered from, literally, across the galaxy. Those fish built some sort of civilization such that they're sending our lasers, radio waves, or building Dyson spheres.
And yet, look at how pretty much every human society deals with immigrants/refugees. We most often find the least common ground between races, ethnicities, nationalities, or any other way to create outgroups, and you think humanity will handle an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization well?
> We most often find the least common ground between races, ethnicities, nationalities, or any other way to create outgroups, and you think humanity will handle an intelligent extraterrestrial civilization well?
But we find PLENTY of common grownds when we talk to the smartesr of those groups and races, across milenia and continents via groups, scientific forums, discussion books.
We find very little common grounds when we have forced encounters with the uneducated trouble makers up to no good, in systems designed for high trust abused by said individuals.
> We find very little common grounds when we have forced encounters with the uneducated trouble makers up to no good, in systems designed for high trust abused by said individuals.
I'd bet good money lots of non-Western European civilizations had that same thought after the English, Spanish, Portuguese, etc. rolled up on their shores.
Hardly a fair or realistic comparison.
Domesticated mammalian[1] pet which share 80+% of our DNA and bred and naturally self-selected over few ten thousand generations for their obedience and take fair amount of training from birth is not the same as anything else on earth let alone from another planet.
[1] Domesticating of non mammalian animals is already quite hard with limited true successes, some birds probably come the closest.
Maybe the author should add this exception to their quote.
And you are comfortable being the dog in this cosmic relationship then?
it's that we're made out of meat: https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
Man I love that story.
Does it make you uncomfortable to think an alien civilization might be somehow superior to humans? That's a pretty immature thing to be insecure about.
Given that my opinions are correct, a superior being would have opinions which tend toward mine. So I'll be fine, dunno about the rest of you punks
If they mean us harm, then yes, I am insecure about it.
What if they're indifferent about our existence? Would you be insecure knowing that a superior species existed that didn't think we were interesting enough to be bothered with?
What if they are telepathic hive minds, able to regrow lost minds like some species on earth regrow limbs, thus having no concept of individual death as such?
Or something like the Cylon resurrection technology, which downloads your memories into the latest fast cloned avatar/physical body?
Good sci-fi novel that included an alien that lacked consciousness: Blindsight by Peter Watts.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)
This is referenced in a sci fi book "The dark forest" of the series "The 3 body problem". It sets a convincing narrative that because of time taken for observation and response and development speed of society it is most likely that all civilizations that announce themselves would likely be a threat in terms of technological supremacy eventually to observing civilizations. In other words, we don't hear anything because any sufficiently advanced civilization would not want to risk being discovered. I.e., the "dark silent forest".
I never did buy the dark forest argument. I mean, even in the books, there were smidgeons of humanity left over. And then all the dimension collapsing strangeness. You just can never be sure.
I dunno, it just reeks of the culture of suspicion in communist China. A product of that place and time.
My own idea is the 'used car salesman' idea of the universe. (Reeking of my own mind and place and time). To me, economics will rule in the galactic community. In that water, metals, energy, it's all cheap and everywhere. No need to have any competition over it. No, the only scarce thing is life and then even more it's intelligence. Any other civilization will be desperate to get rights over us and our history.
So, to me, the aliens will come to us loud and proud. Balloons and banners.
And of course, a contract as long as a the rings of Saturn, with print as small as the atoms.
We shouldn't be wary of the weapons, but the lawyers
>So, to me, the aliens will come to us loud and proud. Balloons and banners.
Charles Stross' Singularity Sky seems the most reasonable to me. Superintelligent computers trade unimaginable technology (their infintely replicable trash) for their most sought after asset (new forms of entertainment) and then just piss off to another world having completely bent our cultural development.
I sincerely hope aliens dont end up being space americans. earth has oil and wmds.
I agree, the dark forest argument seems rooted in a kind of paranoia bordering on the insane. No sane culture says “we better just exterminate anyone else we come across just in case,” which is essentially the threat that the dark forest is guarding against. And a culture that does act that way is likely to end up exterminating itself.
The reason for the paranoia is that the risks are maximal. Any planet can destroy any other planet by accelerating a small projectile at it, so long as it achieves sufficient kinetic force. The projectile can be so tiny as to be effectively undetectable until it’s too late. So you have a situation where everyone you meet is carrying WMDs, and you can’t guarantee you’ll be able to get revenge if they fire first. Finally, every actor knows the predicament and nothing else about the other actors. If you don’t know who is on the other side of the radio transmission, but you do know they can destroy you immediately and without consequence, and you know they know you can do the same to them, the only rational choice is to shoot first, because you’d better not shoot second!
But the reverse it true too. You can't be sure you got every one of the other species. Especially with the transmission times at light speed. In the books, they use these dimension collapsing bombs to eradicate everything, but, um, those don't actually exist. Even in the books, humanity still survives in little groups, some bent on vengeance.
Much safer to make friends or coinvestors, slaves at the very least. Get them all to buy in and police themselves. Better yet, you take that one rare thing, life, intelligence, and put it to work for you. Make the aliens you've just contacted be a part of the pyramid scheme
And yet we see nations like Russia (well, leaders like Putin) acting as if the world is a zero-sum game. The war in Ukraine vaguely looks like the Borg trying to assimilate every resource (geographical or human) in sight.
China (well, Xi) seems to be eyeing a similar path. I feel like there's something worth noting about the Three Body Problem being a product of its culture.
I really have a hard time understanding this train of thought.
One could say these sentences are also a product of "its culture".
The world is not black or white, good or evil. Things are more nuanced and complicated than advertised to be.
I'm not the single source of truth either, but I think there are lots of resources for people interested in avoiding propaganda and trying to understand things more deeply.
Contracts are useless without a way to enforce them and any aliens that already have the means to enforce them won't bother having us sign contracts.
In that scenario, there is a galactic community. Galactic community is going to have something like contracts, and a way to enforce them. It might be a problem for Earth since we would have to get to planet with court, and we don't have FTL.
Galactic community might have rules about developing species, but we can make agreements once "escape".
how is the same thing not true of every creature on earth. Or every tribe? and yet here we are
The decision to not respond should not be considered an option for the UN. They can get a week max to decide what to respond, but a response needs to be sent quick. Otherwise you can assume someone will take the choice away and respond anyway. That someone could be a nation not liking the UN discussions, or it could be a rogue scientists with access to the powerful radios. (I doubt most of us could respond if we wanted to - even if someone is willing to break all laws they are either protected by too much security or they are too expensive to afford - but I guarantee someone who works at such a facility is willing to risk responding if governments delay too long)
Even if the UN makes a respond expect someone else to send a different one at some point.
The interlocutor on the other end experiencing time (or reasoning) at a different scale is an interesting case too, imagine a week feeling like centuries to them.
No individual is going to have the resources to respond to an alien signal unless it comes from Proxima Centari (very maybe) or not much further. No current earth broad would be easily recognizable from Proxima Centari with earth technology - a factor to consider when thinking about why entities aren't being easily detected. A powerful and very carefully aimed laser might work for greater distances but that wouldn't be something that can assembled in someone's garage.
But oppositely, if naturally defusing radio waves could be somehow detected from some further away location, the aliens would know already we're here and indeed lots about us so hand wringing about responding seems dumb there too.
This! I asked JPL/Nasa friends, if we were at Alpha Centuri could we detect Earth signals. Answer: No, not currently.
Please correct me if you have data to the contrary.
this is a question i have explored as part of my own scifi world building:
what is a realistic timeline for first contact, and how will it actually happen?
so we decode a message that we are pretty sure is of alien origin.
we send a message back and then wait a few decades or centuries.
we don't know how far away the origin of the message is. let's assume that it is less than 50 light years. that's still a round trip of 100 years. in other words it's a generational project, and we don't know if our first response is understood. we'll have to keep iterating until we can confirm that we are actually communicating. and then, the next step will be to try to understand each other.
with a round trip that long, even under the most optimal conditions just establishing a dialog based on say math is going to take a few centuries.
of course once we have a dialog, communication is going to speed up because then we can send longer messages.
but then it could still take anywhere from 500 to 1000 years before a common language is developed and we are able to share actual scientific and engineering knowledge.
once we reached that level of communication however, we can collaborate on developing FTL.
contrary to star trek, it was always my idea that FTL travel is not developed by the inhabitants of each planet/star system on their own, but only in collaboration across multiple such systems. maybe even more than two. driven by the desire to meet each other.
so from the point of the first received message it will be one millennium before we get to learn anything about and from these aliens, and another millennium before we can meet them in person.
and that's the optimistic projection. it could just as well take 10 times as long.
I predict that if FTL travel is possible, it will happen in our lifetimes, perhaps even as soon as 20 years ago.
Haha. Time travel :D
That's what they said 30 years ago
We wouldn’t have a long back and forth to establish a common language, we would likely send something like https://cosmicos.github.io.
“CosmicOS is a way to create messages suitable for communication across large gulfs of time and space. It is inspired by Hans Freudenthal's language, Lincos, and Carl Sagan's book, Contact. CosmicOS, at its core, is a programming language, capable of expressing simulations. Simulations are a way to talk, by anology, about the real thing they model.
CosmicOS is structured to communicate the usual math and logic basics, then use that to show how to run programs, then send interesting programs that demonstrate behaviors and interactions, and start communicating ideas through ”theater” and simulations. This is inspired by Freudenthal's idea of staging conversations between his imaginary characters Ha and Hb.”
We fleshy humans will never visit other stars, but our AI children will be able to explore the galaxy with all the time in the world.
if you like science fiction, you may enjoy reading the bobiverse by dennis e. taylor. it describes exactly that scenario, except that the AI is an uploaded human. but that's pretty much the same thing.
Because hardware never breaks, especially not on galactic timescales, and without resources to perpetually replace failing components.
They will have whole galaxies of resources! Massive amounts of redundancy. Mines, Refineries, and Factories on planetary scales.
Not going to happen tomorrow, but perhaps in the next few thousand years something will be ready to begin its journey.
https://www.decisionproblem.com/paperclips/
I'm in an AI cult. Send help. No don't.
Consider that, if the time separation is long enough via light then physical limits make it such that we do not ever have a chance of contact in which case this exchange is essentially indistinguishable from communication with supernatural beings.
Not that I believe they are the same, but many people will come to this conclusion and they would not be probably wrong. Causality is strange.
uhm, develop FTL ? Break causality and the universe ?
well there are two options. without FTL traveling to other stars is impossible and the future won't go beyond communicating with aliens.
so i am being optimistic and hope that FTL is possible.
It's probably not possible, but don't worry, you can still reach other galaxies in your lifetime due to time dilation.
While physically possible, that is even less likely than FTL. It takes enormous amounts of fuel to reach relativistic speeds even with things like antimatter engines. Speeds fast enough for other galaxies are not possible unless invent impossible reactionless drive.
I don't know how you can say it's even less likely than FTL since everything we know shows that FTL is impossible. Virtually impossible is much easier than actually impossible.
I don't know about faster than light, but as soon as we have real AI, it will simply be information and should be able to travel at about speed of light.
It may be simply information, but if you put it into a radio signal and send it into the universe it won’t do anything on its own. Not unless someone receives it and understands it well enough to execute it. Assuming they’d want to - I guess it’s the interstellar equivalent of downloading and running a program from a spam email.
You the Neptunes Pride guy?
Looks great - curious to know what broweser tech is it built with?
Yes! NP was originally written in 2010 so it's vanilla js on the client. Had a python server for many years, but when I had to move from python 2, I switched to js for the server as well. When the server was python I was using googles app engine database (can't remember what its called right now). These days, just a vanilla postgres and boring old SQL statements.
What are you working on these days?
Built 15 years ago and still running!
Is Neptune's Pride still paying your bills?
err. NP never paid any bills :) Was always just a hobby project. It makes enough to cover the hosting, but not much more than that.
My day job is working in a small games company called BlueManchu. We made Void Bastards, Wild Bastards, and have a new one we are prototyping now.
Get better camouflage so we don't get get found in the Dark Forrest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
>The name of the hypothesis derives from Liu Cixin's 2008 novel The Dark Forest, as in a "dark forest" filled with "armed hunter(s) stalking through the trees like ghosts". According to the dark forest hypothesis, since the intentions of any newly contacted civilization can never be known with certainty, then if one is encountered, it is best to make a preemptive strike, in order to avoid the potential extinction of one's own species. The novel provides a detailed investigation of Liu's concerns about alien contact.
Liu Cixin had to break the laws of physics -- badly, multiple times -- in order to make the Dark Forest game theory work. That's not a problem, fictional rules are good fun, but generalizing his conclusions back to the real world without sending them through a customs inspection first is a problem. See also: do the dinosaurs escape because the laws of chaos theory dictate that dinosaur zoos are mathematically impossible? Or do they escape because otherwise I wouldn't pay to see the movie and neither would you?
If we ground ourselves back in reality where the speed of light is probably law and the spooky aliens probably don't get to tamper the laws of physics, the actual game-theoretic winning move is always to grow voraciously, threat or no.
Where the speed of light is probably law (our universe) there is no way aliens could reach earth. The only possibly scenario where earth is in danger is if we terraform and colonize mars (Venus would also do, or a few other large rocks), then we have a falling out and start a major war. The few survivors would not know if anyone is on Mars, but if so they might still be out to get earth so better be quiet. If you are not already in this solar system you can't get here in a useful timeframe no matter how long lived you are.
We should expand our definition of Aliens visiting earth.
If we received a signal (at light speed) that described how to build a physical alien computer, and then ran a program on that computer, which happened to be AI, we would have alien visitors.
An interocitor!
"Normal view! Normal view! Normal VIEW! Normal VIEEeewwww..."
What would we become in such a universe? We would take a step back, it will become about survival again (I know it's like that on earth here and there), not about growing together, exploring. It's like Star Trek's mirror universe.
Sure I'd fight for humanity, but I'd be so disappointed. Maybe even enough to just give up.
(I have to admit I just could not make it through part 2 of the Three Body problem, it went to slow for me.)
Following that:
> The Berserker hypothesis, also known as the deadly probes scenario, is the idea that humans have not yet detected intelligent alien life in the universe because it has been systematically destroyed by a series of lethal Von Neumann probes.
Yeah but they clearly didn't do a very good job on Earth so how systematic could they be?
Don't get me wrong, it's a wonderful premise for a book which can simply mobilize a plot device to brush this problem aside. However, if we want to bring the conclusions back to reality they have to undergo a customs inspection which flags said plot device.
The solution is that the probes were built by a long ago technological civilization on Earth as a desperate measure in an interstellar war.
The probes are out there and were programmed never to come back to Earth.
Personally, I like the plot idea that all of the intelligent aliens know of earth life but intentionally ignore us because they visited in the time of the dinosaurs or even before. There's some material the universe values like how we value oil, and they simply extracted all of it from our solar system. This material allows for whatever sci-fi thing we think is impossible, worm holes, constant acceleration, FTL travel, Dyson sphere material, etc.
But why do we think the aliens as a polity will behave in a way that fits into our own concept of competition between groups?
Couldn't they have some other way of seeing things?
They could. However their different way might be worse than our concept.
Though survival of the fittest is likely a law and so they will have a concept of competition between groups of some form (though their definition of groups will be different) simply because those without will be destroyed by the first group that does have that concept.
That's an allegory for life under authoritarian rule, not a literal alien contact plan
IIRC the author said there are no meta layers of meaning, it’s just honest to god fiction written to be entertaining. I’m struggling a little myself to accept that for the entire trilogy, but that’s that.
I haven’t read these books but it’s not unreasonable that this author or any other author could have reason to not be forthright about what their book is about
Or, both.
Bold to assume aliens will ascribe to something besides despotism
You can't imagine that one single alien race anywhere will deviate from this?
Wouldn't that kinda imply that your vision on the topic is almost certainly wrong anyways?
As a pragmatic opportunist
- Setup a massive array of antennas in space for reception only
- Try to decode their radio traffic and understand how they are exchanging information
- Steal their their knowledge and use it to advance human race forward.
- Reduce all our electromagnetic emissions to minimum to deny them the same advantage. Forbid anyone from sending signal towards them so we have time to technologically catch up to them without them noticing.
Any kind of contact will ends up in abysmal disaster as we have seen in the past, when advanced civilization shown up on shores of less advanced one.
Hopefully we never have the pleasure of discovering Prothean style ruins on a nearby planet and Pluto isn't actually a frozen mass relay. That one never ends well.
Though I personally love the idea of advanced, civilized extraterrestrial life. I hope it exists (statistically feels likely but yet to be confirmed). Even if it turns out we humans are at a near lockstep with another civilization it'd be game changing if we could communicate especially.
All that said, maybe there's a "galactic civilization onboarding" program once a species meets a sufficiently advanced criteria independently, with no outside intervention. Perhaps the universe will turn our ideas on their head, and assumptions may not apply.
Our understanding of the world, for however great it is, is still likely full of things we can't fathom and unknowns we don't know. Its fun to speculate but the reality is we are only basing most of our knowledge on how things might be in the universe based on our singular planet's path of evolution.
It makes it truly hard to think of what alternative life forms may exist.
Star trek-ish idea of massive cooperation between species is desperately naive though. Its secondary-school level of hand-holding and singing kumbayah around fire, and yet it still couldn't evade massive wars that sometimes wiped out entire civilizations.
Lockstep evolution is extremely improbable. Even 1000 years head start is massive, a more realistic one would be tens of millions of years or more.
The space is finite, so is Milky way. Eventually, even if its far in the future, species will compete for resources and energy. The smarter ones realize that problems are easier solved as soon as possible, and we have dark forest stuff. Mankind is slowly also inching in that realization. We should work hard on improving ourselves massively and spreading out before caring whats out there. I simply can't imagine a realistic scenario where there won't be some immediate attack, ie speeding up some very dark asteroid into relativistic speeds, aimed at Earth.
Also, why should xenophoby, racism and similar perks be available only to humanity. Even we can see how deeply flawed creatures we are.
>Star trek-ish idea of massive cooperation between species is desperately naive though. Its secondary-school level of hand-holding and singing kumbayah around fire, and yet it still couldn't evade massive wars that sometimes wiped out entire civilizations.
Indeed, I simply hate losing my sense of whimsy in these discussions because anything is still possible. Though realistically, yes, its worse odds than pretty much any other possibility. No disputing that.
>The space is finite, so is Milky way. Eventually, even if its far in the future, species will compete for resources and energy. The smarter ones realize that problems are easier solved as soon as possible.
Is space not ever expanding? My entire conceptualized version of what space (as in outer space) is that its always expanding, we actually have zero idea where the edges of the actual universe are, or if they even exist beyond theorizing. It may be the ultimate in lending itself to more cooperation than conflict as a result, since new resources are indefinitely being created.
Then again, if you believe expansion is constrained only to the Milky Way Galaxy (I don't see why it has to be, if we can colonize an entire galaxy I feel strongly at that point the technology for intergalactic travel exists at the same time, so we can finally see whats up in the Backward Galaxy[0]). Given this constraint, expansion over time will lead to issues inevitably but who's to say it couldn't be resolved in different capacities? Perhaps even civilizations have a natural apex expansion size (IE, its not actually infinite) and that creates natural growth boundaries. Since we aren't even a galactic species yet, we don't know how that would shape out in reality.
>and we have dark forest stuff
Or we simply don't know what stage other civilizations are in, or if they exist at all (though statistically, I've been told by people who absolutely know more than I do on multiple occasions its extremely unlikely there isn't some form of extraterrestrial life that would roughly resemble plants and animals but civilization is far less guaranteed)
We could actually be the most advanced (imagine that, it seems wild to me, but it is one possible), or it could be that indeed, it may follow the Dark Forest[1] hypothesis).
>We should work hard on improving ourselves massively and spreading out before caring whats out there. I simply can't imagine a realistic scenario where there won't be some immediate attack, ie speeding up some very dark asteroid into relativistic speeds, aimed at Earth.
I agree with the massive expansion, I don't think it should come at the entire expense of understanding what may be out there also, but in terms of resource allocation, expansion should have been paramount since the 1960s at least, IMO.
Eventually this rock, one way or another, will reach its inevitable peak and as a species we would do well to be spread around.
I don't know that we are guaranteed to be attacked. It makes alot of assumptions about how civilization evolves that is very human centric, but it is in fact the only model we have so I can't blame anyone for adopting it without question, but there always exists the possibility that there are other models of evolution that are less conflict driven and promote cooperation
>Also, why should xenophoby, racism and similar perks be available only to humanity. Even we can see how deeply flawed creatures we are.
In the same vain of this, why shouldn't they be? What purpose do those ideas even serve? They're not evolutionary constructs, they're cultural / societal ones created to justify oppressing one group of humans by another. Another civilization could have simply made better choices and evolved on a planet that trended toward cooperation and not conflict.
We only understand our version of how evolution trends, it doesn't make it law of the universe until we actually can study other non-human civilizations.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NGC_4622
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_forest_hypothesis
You're unlikely to get any radio signal that isn't specifically meant for you.
If SETI would be able to catch their signal on Earth, then antenna array in the space aimed at them, far from Earth to prevent our noise could work.
That's not how electromagnetic radiation works.
It kind of is. You're thinking directionality, but there's also the fact that optimal transmission will involve using compression and possibly encryption, which by its nature turns the signal into noise if you don't already know it's a signal. An optimal signal, which it seems reasonable to assume would be what aliens would be using by the time they're communicating across star systems, would be much more difficult to detect as a signal than something like an FM radio station, which puts a lot of energy into broadcasting a carrier that is there even if the station is transmitting total silence.
You're forgetting the Contact method where the actual signal is buried in a beacon signal. The beacon signal is very much a "primitive" non-random not noise signal...primes. Now that you've recorded enough of that beacon signal, someone analyses each of the pulses to realize there's a message embedded within. This way, you don't need a response to know someone go it. When they magically show up in the machine you've sent the plans as that message, you'll know the message was received.
Efficient communication looks like noise.
This presumes they have the same nasty survival-of-the-fittest kill-or-be-killed attitude as humanity. Our evolution kinda created that but it doesn't have to apply everywhere. I think it's entirely possible that alien civilisations could exist that are a lot more symbiotic.
We have a saying in Holland "the innkeeper trusts his guests like himself" which seems to apply here.
>Our evolution kinda created that but it doesn't have to apply everywhere.
Presumably any alien species was also shaped by evolution, so is also likely to be similarly competitive. Maybe you can escape your evolutionary past. But maybe not.
They'd have to get through The Great Filter, so maybe they'd have avoided or have moved beyond some of our evolutionary downfalls.
"The Great Filter" is probably just interspecies contact.
I would hope so, but this whole situation reminds me of a quote from the writer William S. Burroughs: "This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games."
It is a bleak view. When I even think about the behaviors of some of the animals (e.g. seals, praying mantises) we share existence with, it seems like it could be accurate. On the positive side, the concept of the infinite game (e.g. culture) is what should give us hope.
It doesn't even apply in this world. There are many examples of a more advanced civilization steamrolling a simpler one, but there are also examples of that not happening. It's by no means an inevitability.
Right; or, since they are not competing with us for resources, they could kill us just for sport.
Again the concept of sport imposes human concepts on a hypothetical alien culture.
There's no reason to assume their society would have developed along similar lines. I'm sure there's alien civilisations that are more aggressive than us, but also ones that are less so.
I don't think we'll ever meet any though as our lifespan is just so short on a universal scale. And FTL travel seems to be impossible otherwise we'd have seen signs of it.
Of course according to our current physics understanding it is also impossible but I don't think humanity is very smart yet. But this thing might be right.
>the concept of sport imposes human concepts on a hypothetical alien culture.
Many animals like cats do it. Its not a human concept but one from superior smarter predators which should occur regardless from what planet they are. The greater the differences in intelligence and power the easier it is to justify cruelty.
I do think it's less likely because to actually travel space they would need to be so technologically advanced that we simply wouldn't be worth fighting or destroying. Maybe studying which could be cruel in its own way.
> I'm sure there's alien civilisations that are more aggressive than us, but also ones that are less so.
What is the minimum amount of aggression necessary to evolve sentience? What is the maximum amount of aggression in an interstellar space-faring species? Where is humanity on that scale?
A super-aggressive species would likely self-annihilate before possessing sufficient energy to travel interstellar distances... So the jury's still out on us.
> And FTL travel seems to be impossible otherwise we'd have seen signs of it.
What signs? Projects like LIGO that measure gravitational waves are still measuring cataclysmic collisions of ultra massive bodies. Maybe once the detector is good enough to detect exoplanets and smaller objects we can start drawing some conclusions.
I don’t believe FTL is possible, but on the off chance that it is, we’d be so deep into technology-as-magic territory that any speculation on detectability is totally pointless.
If some species out there is trying to detect life by the organisms electromagnetic emissions... that's a dumb species.
When I see what kind of information we sent out, I would not koof my breath.
We would learn that they are gelatinous beings who coi5nt in base 17 and show an antenna to say hello.
Your are reasoning like a 15th century conquistador with spaceships.
> Any kind of contact will ends up in abysmal disaster as we have seen in the past, when advanced civilization shown up on shores of less advanced one.
Interstellar travel is mind-boggingly difficult and expensive. Even assuming 100% fuel-efficiency, it is basically impossible to conquer other worlds, and doing so would come at zero benefits for the homeworld, as anything that could be brought back from conquered exoplanets could be made for far cheaper and faster at home. Atoms are the same everywhere in the galaxy, no planet has any unique stuff that is valuable enough that is makes sense to haul it across the galaxy.
The one thing that is cheap to trade is information, so why not cooperate with everyone? Competition is useless as we've seen, so why not give away everything we know in exchange for everything they know?
We could give them everything what we know and they could give us back a relativistic kill missile. No reason to try to conquer a planet if you can just extinguish a protentional threat, which luckily was naive to be useful before extinguishing.
But why would they send a missile if we can't possibly do them any harm? That would just risk triggering a response for no reasons.
I'd be more concerned about some alien force moving through our part of the galaxy and we get stepped on and squashed like an ant on the pavement.
Your comment just reminded me of a sci-fi novel called Roadside Picnic that I learned about on a different thread. Just because of that idea where aliens could come across us and not pay us any attention in the same way that a human might ignore an ant.
> Forbid anyone from sending signal towards them so we have time to technologically catch up to them without them noticing.
This is going to be difficult. Immediately there would be cults that would be inviting them to earth to salvage us.
Shades of "Three body problem".
Yeah but they would need to transfer for a long enough time to be noticed and decoded by the other side, so it would easy to spot and eliminate them quickly. Unless they are a smart cult and managed to make some self unpacking and executing coding which they could send over radio.
Sounds like you read Remembrance of the Earth's Past
I did not, but it looks interesting, thanks for the tip.
I didn't know Proust wrote sf.
He did, but he called his SF novel In Search of Lost Earth.
Time is a factor here. How close in time and space would be them?
If we get something coming from more than 100 light years away we might not have the technology to respond, and if we do it may not matter anyway if we are at risk of not having a technological civilization anymore 100-200 years forward. So the meaningful actions on those cases may not include answering back.
Then it will be the actual use of that message. Lets assume that we will decide that is a signal from a civilization that is out there. It will be a signal meant for us and for any other civilization that doesn't have the knowledge/culture level as them, meant for giving us a common ground for communicating back, or it will be something that just will tell us that someone intelligent is out there, but no mean to understand it?
So the options are that we find apparently benevolent aliens willing to contact us, or that we find out that someone is out there but no way to communicate/reach them. I think the second scenario is the most probable one, and how our civilization will react if widely enough will change with time, novelty at first and indifference a few years later.
I cannot imagine any scenario where we're just 100-200 years away from "no more tech" that isn't purely total nuclear destruction. Even then, we'd probably be so close to getting back to a technological civilization that it'd be a blip in the radar at best if we're talking about a society that far away.
We lost 150 years of progress? That's okay, we had 800 more years to advance before the aliens showed up or whatever.
It's such a weird thing I see so many people assuming. We were down to like 16,000 humans on Earth at one point, and that was before we'd developed things that you could theoretically scavenge and jumpstart your tech.
People need to stop doomscrolling; I'm certain this is depression projected.
When we have a nuclear destruction, and some of us survive, then we will have a problem which we cannot solve easily even today: absolute annihilation of the ozone layer. It won’t be a soft reset at all. If the ozone layer disappeared right now, its consequences would be absolutely catastrophic even with the current civilization completely intact.
With all due respect, I don't think you understand what the "worst case" scenario looks like for global warming, and how close we are to that scenario. For reference, check out figure 1 in this nature article [1].
That has warming by 2300 as 8C in an "emissions continue current trends" path.
Here's chatgpt giving a picture of what 8C warming looks like. Speculative, hallucinations, caveat emptor, etc...but to give a sense of proportion this, last time the earth was 8C *cooler* than now, ice covered 25% of the planet:
> At +8°C, Earth is fundamentally transformed. Large parts of today’s populated zones—South Asia, the Middle East, Africa, southern Europe, the southern U.S.—are functionally uninhabitable for humans outdoors. Wet-bulb temperatures regularly exceed survivable limits. Agriculture collapses across the subtropics; even mechanized, climate-controlled farming is marginal. Most of the world’s food comes from high-latitude regions: a narrow band across northern Canada, Scandinavia, and Siberia. Sea levels are dozens of meters higher, drowning coastal megacities; Miami, New York, Shanghai, and London are gone. Phoenix is lifeless desert. Seattle is coastal tundra, wetter but still survivable.
> Civilization persists only in fragments. Mass migration and resource wars have rewritten borders. Population is a fraction of 21st-century levels. Global trade, universities, and modern governance are mostly memories. Local, self-sufficient polities dominate. The United States as an institution likely dissolves or transforms beyond recognition—2 out of 10 chance of recognizable survival. Harvard or MIT survive, if at all, as digital archives or autonomous AI-driven knowledge systems—3 out of 10. The world would still have people and culture, but not civilization as we know it.
Edit: I would appreciate knowing why I'm getting downvoted when I added citations for *possible* warming paths (from nature!). Yes, the chatgpt explanation is speculative but I mean, look at the thread we're discussing.
[1]: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41612-020-0121-5
I appreciated your comment. I’ll also note that the path to that future will not be fun - you/chatgpt describe a kind of end state 275 years away, but things will evolve to that state over time. I suspect the downvotes may reflect people’s desire not to face the likely reality.
In Carl Sagan's Cosmos, he talks about how many advanced civilizations could be out there capable of radio astronomy, and how as in our own experience, we have the capability to wipe out own civilization, so that would also be a factor in other advanced civilizations and could act as a limiting factor. There are many such factors other than nuclear destruction that could impact all functioning of an advanced society, rendering it nonviable.
The idea has nothing to do with "doom scrolling". Go watch some Cosmos...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qsl9f83P0Ys
It was also before we'd burned all the easily accessible fossil fuels.
Electrification of transportation is already well underway. Obviously ships and planes will lag behind, and may even be forced to use biofuels if we run out of fossil fuels, but the idea that the world will stop when we run out is outdated.
Green power generation is also making huge strides forward, and battery technology is improving enough to make fully green grids a reality. We already see articles about how some countries are managing to go entire days without burning any fossil fuels for power generation. This will increase over time despite what the doomsayers predict. We aren't there yet, but the progress is almost inevitable.
The bigger problem is that we've already burned so much fossil fuel that we are noticeably altering the climate. This is going to cause a lot of stresses in the future, especially in a post-collapse scenario.
They’re going days without burning fossil fuels by using high tech solar panels and windmills and such. What happens when they stop being made and they eventually break down? You’ll have to bootstrap tech again but without low-tech sources of concentrated energy. Electrified transport is great today, useless two hundred years ago.
We mined all of the easily accessible drywall gypsum too, I guess we wouldn't be able to have houses either and would have to live outside in the cold and rain!
Perhaps the aliens will share advanced technology with us such as how to build a tent.
I can't wait until everyone realizes how easy it is to rebuild Göbekli Tepe with hand tools.
There are lots of other building materials available. What other sources of energy are there which are suitable for driving a new industrial revolution if you’re starting over? Wind and solar aren’t worth too much without high tech to enable them. Biomass is insufficient. Nuclear needs high tech. Hydro could do, but it’s pretty limiting.
Thankfully, unless somehow everything manmade disappears, we'll have scraps of windmills, solar panels, and hydro electric generators - with that laying around, it's easy to eventually figure out the underlying concepts and rebuild them.
> So the options are that we find apparently benevolent aliens willing to contact us, or that we find out that someone is out there but no way to communicate/reach them. I think the second scenario is the most probable one
I hope the second scenario is the most probable. Any aliens that could contact us would already know we can't even get along with each other, much less them. Even the most benevolent of aliens should see us as a "problem". (I was going to say "threat" but who am I kidding.)
Well now that Beatriz Villarroels paper on transient objects in orbit prior to our space programs has been through the peer review process and has been published, what if we framed the question as "What do we do if the non human intelligence was already here"
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-92162-7
My upcoming story game, a love letter to SETI and the Hacker News crowd, offers some perspectives on the question: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3040110/Outsider/
It will be out in 2 weeks!
former chairman of the board of the SETI Institute John Gertz:
'In fact, the author has heard from serious U.S. SETI researchers that they are convinced that “men in black suits” will appear at their laboratory door the moment a detection is confirmed.'
Source: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1701.08422
This seems like romanticizing. I don’t get the impression that maintaining a constant watch on SETI researchers is something any intelligence agency is incentivized to do.
As it sounds like you know, it would be great if you can articulate the boundaries of a prototypical intelligence agency mandate. Because then it should be a cinch to describe why ‘communication from a foreign power of as-yet indeterminate technology advancment relative to modern day superpowers to (checks notes) members of any of the 200 some odd nation-states on the planet who can afford operating a radio telescope’ doesn’t fall within that mandate
I'd expect them to monitor SETI to intercept any first contacts the same amount as they monitor Miss Cleo to make sure her crystal ball isn't showing state secrets.
And yet no one is ever able to describe what agency or jurisdiction these "men in black suits" will work for.
This basically is just demonstrating how people very very good in their field can still fail Civics 101. Men In Black were some funny movies back in the day, but they were just movies.
Well obviously they'd be employed by the oil companies to suppress knowledge of advanced energy sources.
I see the speak-first,research-never is strong with this one.
—-
https://www.public.news/p/pentagon-is-illegally-hiding-secre...
> What do we do if SETI is successful?
Beg to be saved from ourselves? Fire up the old electronic thumb? Open a theme restaurant?
I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit.
It's the only way to be sure.
With the world today, if it is successful we should 'run'. We will attack them and they will kill us.
Humanity Needs Aliens to Survive => https://rodyne.com/?p=3051
Though I feel this is fairly lazily written, it does have a basic premise I've seen before.
I read an article about post cold war US society. Basically, from 1989-2001 the United States was in a transition period that culminated with the first opportunity to seize on a "universal bad" (terrorism) because the USSR filled the role so readily for so long, US society was set adrift with partisan factions that couldn't find a common enemy to get behind in times of internal struggle.
That is the gist of the article, sub USSR for aliens and all of humanity for US society and you have the same basic outline
I think SETI is a worthwhile thing do but rank its chances of success at zero.
Just my personal opinion.
I think it's wise to follow the maxim of not calling something impossible unless some physical law prevents it
In the end, I kinda... don't care. Look up - there's nothing. There should be at least some alien civilizations trying to make their presence known. There should be some signs somewhere that could be recognized universally as either "stay away" or "come here". It really should be trivial to locate technological civilizations unless you've got some incredibly solid reason as to why EVERY SINGLE ALIEN CIVILIZATION IN THE UNIVERSE acts a certain way. Color me doubtful.
We have billions and billions of data points showing the Universe is empty. We have exactly one (1) data point showing it isn't. And that's us.
Besides, just look at the timeline. The universe has only been cool enough, with enough stable stars, with enough formed planets for potential life to form for a few billion years. Between that and the Drake equation, life alone is likely to be unreasonably uncommon. Life that forms after a planet becomes stable, doesn't have any planet-altering disasters, evolves to complex multicellular forms, evolves some kind of intelligence, becomes social, forms a society, advances technology, and starts exploring the universe...? Why bother? The math doesn't work.
Note: I'm not speaking about any KIND of life existing, I'm speaking about technological civilizations. My belief is that we are essentially the forerunners.
When you look up remember that the majority of what you see is in the same sub-arm of the spiral arm of the milky way that we are in. Of those we can see a large number or binary systems - two stars orbiting each other. We fancy telescopes we can see a lot more of course.
All the power of stars, and most of them still are not powerful enough that we can see them even on a dark night! What chance does any alien have of sending a message that reaches us if the light from their star isn't even powerful enough to be easy to detect? It was suggested elsewhere that even if we find an alien, we probably cannot respond if they are more than 100 light years away just because we can't get a message out powerful enough that they can detect (I can't verify this claim but it is reasonable)
It's probably worth considering that across a sufficiently large distance, they effectively no longer exist. Their signals haven't reached you, and with the increasing speed of the universe's expansion, they will never reach you. Eventually, everything will be expanding at well beyond the speed of light, so short of being able to cut through space and time, we're not reaching any of these destinations. For all intents and purposes, they don't exist for us. We'll never see any evidence, nor could we ever see any evidence.
So in reality, there is a maximum distance we need to consider - the distance where any signal would have any chance of reaching a detectable region.
But besides, this still misses the most important part. Until 10 billion years ago, stars were much too big and poor in metals and unstable. We didn't have an earth until 5 billion years ago. It was inhospitable to life for a LONG time. We've only had multicellular organisms of any kind for 800M years. Our star is unusually calm, meaning we don't have to worry about being bleached every 5 million years or whatever.
I've said this a couple times in this conversation, but the best guess is honestly that we're the forerunners.
I have no doubt that civilizations are out there. Maybe a handful, maybe nearing infinity. But out there.
The problem is "out there" is so far away, we are all isolated on our own island worlds. An ocean of space so vast we cannot meaningfully traverse it with probes or radio, to say nothing of manned interstellar flight.
But it never gets boring for me to imagine what other civilizations there might be, and how they might be different from us and from each other.
> We have billions and billions of data points showing the Universe is empty.
Wat?
"Absence of Evidence is not Evidence of Absence", Carl Sagan
You're right, but it doesn't matter - we're finding evidence of absence everywhere we look.
(Again, please note that I'm only speaking to technological civilizations; I fully believe the universe is teeming with microbial life.)
This is just an absurd assertion.
> we're finding evidence of absence everywhere we look.
Show your work. Show me any such "evidence".
You seem to be unfamiliar even with what kind of data cosmologists and astronomers process.
Sure thing.
We've been to the moon. There are no machines. We've been to Mars (via machines). There are no civilizations. We've seen the orbits of thousands of planets which are absolutely too hot for any biological processes to synthesize. We've scanned countless stars and determined them to be too unstable for anything to survive in their orbit. We've looked into every single confusing thing in the universe we could find and have seen natural explanations for nearly every single phenomenon.
Do you think we just don't know anything about the universe? There is tons of evidence of absence. It might not be complete enough to make a guess yet, and that's a fine argument to make, but it's weird to pretend that the evidence doesn't exist.
edit: And again, while it's not evidence of absence, I'm still waiting for a galactic signpost to pop up somewhere. Unless you've got some explanation for why not one single civilization anywhere, even ones which have left their home planet and have nothing too serious to worry about with respect to retaliation?
Your infantile understanding of science is a terrible citation of 'evidence'.
By your logic:
"I looked in every volcano on Earth, and was unable to find life. This is evidence that Earth is a lifeless husk."
Also by your own logic:
"We've looked at handful of... planetary orbits(?!)... and have yet to find a single 'signpost' of civilization. This is evidence of absence."
Learn how to gracefully admit when you are wrong, and stop doubling down on ignorance.
Yes. The Fermi Argument strongly implies this sort of question is pointless, an exercise in wishful speculation.
Probably thousands of years from now, but I do wonder when people will stop using "the universe is too vast to know anything" as an excuse. We've still got people pretending the ocean is an enormous, occluded mystery.
The idea that humanity is the only civilization in the entire universe strikes me as the absolute height of human arrogance.
Lots of things seem arrogant to lots of people, but without some logical basis, it's worth ignoring.
This is an ad hominem argument. It attacks a position not because it's wrong, but because if you advance it you're a bad person.
Broadcast them Star Trek reruns to convince them to adopt the Prime Directive.
>What do we do if SETI is successful?
Resume the search for intelligence right here on Earth?
Isn't that what the movie Contact was about?
In all seriousness, I think if we did receive something, it would be classified immediately, and the government, or governments, will move very swiftly with a heavy hand to silence the discovery. At the very least until they know exactly what it is, what it is conveying, and how to respond.
That said, I think that if it got out, a lot of people would absolutely lose their snot. Completely. It would be chaos in some places.
Ha, or, perhaps for a 2025 variant: it would quickly be shared publicly by government scientists (who are not as secretive or good at keeping secrets as the public seems to think!), the evidence all shared publicly, subject to international peer review and consensus. And then 70% of people would believe it's made-up. The US-sphere would believe China made it up as a plot (or "globalists") and the developing world and BRICS would believe the US made it up as a plot. Western countries would repeatedly sign and then remove themselves from international treaties to prepare for contact.
Bit too on the nose, maybe, but a heck of a lot more likely than a coverup by government scientists.
So... Like Contact?
People would simply not believe it. I don’t think there is world where aliens messaging is taken seriously on earth (at scale). People would attribute it to the military.
>That said, I think that if it got out, a lot of people would absolutely lose their snot. Completely. It would be chaos in some places.
It would definitely be the most important discovery ever made and would move some billions of dollars, but realistically I think people would just carry on with their lives (assuming physical contact with them is impossible in a lifetime).
I think there were be the usual bunch of weirdos that predict the end of the world for Thursday, and then the other significant batch of weirdos who will quickly explain it with their religion of choice.
After some ohhhs and ahhhhs we would switch to the next thing.
The moot question isn't what will happen after Earth receives and confirms an alien signal.
The question is moot, because any alien species advanced enough to send directed signals across solar systems, can and will reach, overwhelm and subsume Earth with ease, once we Earthlings manage to contact such aliens.
And if such events happened in the past, that might explain a few interesting notions we humans tend to have.
"Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God." ~Shermer's last law
But what if that was their intention from the very beginning? What if Earth itself is just yet another alien farm?
What if Earth's beautiful and bountiful life (flora and fauna) was the result of terraforming, by aliens, but indirectly using spores tacked onto cosmic flying objects (comets, meteors, asteroids) that they knew will cross such solar systems and crash into inhabitable planets on some not so random chance?
Abiogenesis is the emergence of life from nonliving organics. It is the leading theory regarding how life spawned on Earth, but it is being questioned due to recent evidence.
Conditions for Life: For life to exist, certain conditions must be met. These include:
* Presence of Water: Essential for biochemical reactions. * Organic Compounds: Building blocks like carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen are crucial. * Energy Source: Sunlight or geothermal energy can drive life processes.
Evidence and Research: While no definitive evidence of extraterrestrial life has been found, scientists continue to explore environments on other planets, such as Mars and Europa, which may harbor conditions suitable for life. The study of extremophiles on Earth—organisms that thrive in harsh conditions—provides insights into how life might exist elsewhere in the universe
One prominent theory regarding the extraterrestrial origin of life is Panspermia.
The Panspermia Hypothesis suggests that life, or the building blocks of life, may have been transported to Earth via comets, asteroids, or space dust.
There are several forms of panspermia:
* Naturalistic Panspermia: Life evolves on another planet and is ejected into space, eventually landing on Earth.
* Directed Panspermia: Intelligent beings from another planet intentionally send life to Earth.
* Intelligent Design Panspermia: Life is designed and seeded by extraterrestrial intelligences.
I believe Earth life is the result of Natural Panspermia. But if SETI or other observatories detect and confirm alien signal, then Directed Panspermia might be our origin.
https://www.popularmechanics.com/space/a66036689/a-scientist...
> The question is moot, because any alien species advanced enough to send directed signals across solar systems, can and will reach, overwhelm and subsume Earth with ease, once we Earthlings manage to contact such aliens.
Not possible if our scientific understanding of c is accurate.
I don't care how many episodes of ST you've binged; warp speed is just fantasy.
Is possible, and easy if one accelerates at 1 G for half the trip, then decelerates at 1 G for half the trip. Conventional nuclear fission AND fusion rocket engines, like NERVA, already exist and are flight-certified. 1 light year could be traveled in 2 pilot years.
What is SciFi today may become the reality in the future.
The iconic flip-type TriCorder telecommunicator of Star Trek, became the inspiration of the world's first portable cellular phone (first of which was the DynaTac, quickly followed by MicroTac and StarTac (world's first portable flip phone, and yup, that name is not a coincidence)) by Motorola (more famous iteration later as the iconic Moto Razr). Motorola engineer Martin Cooper said that watching Captain Kirk using his communicator on the television show Star Trek inspired him with a stunning idea -- to develop a handheld mobile phone.
https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/motorola-startac-rainbow-ce...
Star Trek's teleportation may have been SciFi, but Quantum teleportation has been proven to be doable in reality.
https://www.digitaljournal.com/tech-science/first-demonstrat...
https://www.aol.com/articles/oxford-physicists-achieve-telep...
Iron Man's Arc Reactor is a fusion reactor and pure sci-fi, but the Chinese and Americans are racing to build the first viable fusion reactors. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a64704814/ch...
Did you know that Radar was invented during experiments with radio waves for "Death Ray Gun" weaponry? A death ray is a theoretical particle beam or electromagnetic weapon that gained popularity in science fiction during the 1920s and 1930s after inventors like Nikola Tesla claimed to have developed one. British scientists, asked to evaluate the feasibility of a radio-wave "death ray gun" (supposedly being developed by the Nazis) finally concluded it was impossible, but realized the same principles could be used for aircraft detection.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-41188464
Galileo was jailed (put under house arrest, till he died of ill health) for his "blasphemous" statements concerning Heliocentricity, etc., but ancient Hindus have known and documented (in their Vedic texts) about Multiverse, Observer Effect, Illusory nature of Reality (e.g., modern science confirms that touch is an illusion of reality, we really cannot touch anything: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=TDgey6g65X0) , and fundamentals of mathematics and science since thousands of years, many centuries or millennia before such concepts became understood and accepted by Western scientists or theorists.
Human flight was considered an impossible fantasy, until the Wright Brothers made it a reality.
Space flight was unproven until the Soviets made it a reality.
Did you know that scientists estimated the mass of all matter and all energy of this Universe, but they believe it accounts only for 5% of the content of the Universe? The remaining 95% of this Universe is unknown, but scientists believe it to be comprised of anti-matter and anti-energy, which are not yet understood properly by modern science. SciFi concept, this may seem, but that's the prevailing scientific theory.
Now think about this idea.. What if an advanced alien species, were made of anti-matter and using anti-energy? Would their technology obey the laws of physics as our modern science understands? Would they be able to travel across the galaxy faster than we humans deem possible with our limited understanding of how the Universe works?
'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic', according to Arthur C. Clarke's third law.
I couldn't imagine worshipping aliens even if they were powerful enough to be indistinguishable from gods.
I also think that if such powerful aliens (or actual gods for that matter) were to exist, they wouldn't give a rat's ass about whether we worship them. Because we'd have nothing to offer them. It's like us stepping on ants without thinking about it. Their world is so limited it's meaningless to us. If any gods existed we'd be the same to them.
In any case my intuition will always be to fight hostile authorities, even if its futile. I would never be able to be in the military for example.
The aliens, if they exist, will certainly powerful enough to destroy humanity's paltry defenses (and our satellites will be first to fall during an alien invasion), but you are right, they won't bother negotiating or defeating us, they will simply annihilate humanity (via biological weaponry, perhaps), terraform this beautiful bountiful Earth to suit their needs, and use it as they deem fit.
For all of humanity's much vaunted intelligence, we really haven't bothered to unitedly plan for any threats from space, natural or otherwise.
If advanced alien beings did visit Earth in the past, they could be easily have become worshipped as Gods by the humans of that time.
Earth is such a tiny speck in the vast emptiness of space, that unless galaxy colonising aliens are capable of traveling in spaceships at FTL (faster than light) speeds, it may indeed take them hundreds or thousands or millions of years to pass by Earth again on their next sweep through the Goldilocks planets in their terraforming list in this corner of the Universe.
>I couldn't imagine worshipping aliens even if they were powerful enough to be indistinguishable from gods.
A lot of other people seem to be happy worshipping humans of rather limited intelligence right now.
Are you religious?
If yes you are already worshipping and imaginary concept. At least with aliens you would have some kind of connection with reality.
If not the word god is not really a part of the vocabulary.
They are too far away.
Now, if they left some time ago...
Send memes. Most commenters here assume receiving a message means aliens can reach us - they can't. Think about how distant the closest galaxy is and think about how long it would take to reach them even at light speed. The size of the ship needed, the amount of fuel needed not only for acceleration but stopping as well. Even if they 100x or 1000x our space abilities, it would still be impossible.
It also assumes that it is nearby aliens. Our radio transmissions have only gone 100 light years, and probably not detectable beyond a few. But the aliens could be saying hello to everyone from thousand light years away.
It also could not be a message. I think we have ruled out nearby Dyson Swarm (as in thousands of light years), but we could find one in rest of our galaxy or even Andromeda. Dyson Swarms should be noticeably weird infrared stars.
It is also quite possible that we never decode their message. Even with one designed to be decoded, their thinking could be too different.
Or they could just pop up here because they have mastered quantum physics and can just use quantum tunnelling to teleport whole ship across space in an instant.
We can make it so it's never aliens, or always aliens. Public and science opinion has become a free for all lately.
People are so caught up in the 3I/ATLAS stuff, for example. Should we beam a message to it? What should we think of it? It's a circus.
Let's go back to Boyajian's Star instead. Can we really be sure the dimming is not caused by a mothership coming from that direction? It explains everything, right? Maybe that's how they communicate, by sending a paper plane and opening a large occlusion origami that says "we come from this general direction" (I'm cosplaying Avi Loeb here, satirically).
There's something about interpretation in all of this. Space is full of radio signals. We determine lots of them to be natural (with good reason).
I'm afraid proposing "we should answer" (in case of electromagnetic signals) could lead to a scenario in which people are encouraged to believe something without the means to verifying it. Some idiot group could do it just to increase the popular optimism about space in order to induce a favorable perception on the development of space technologies with the ultimate goal of just bumping some industry with money. It's the kind of world we live in right now, unfortunatelly.
If we want to be serious about humanity's place in the universe, first we need to be serious about our home right here. I don't think we're mature enough to have responsible control over technologies that could be used to send a powerful signal into space.
> People are so caught up in the 3I/ATLAS stuff, for example. Should we beam a message to it? What should we think of it? It's a circus.
Is it really a circus? Seems almost everyone who knows what they're talking about says it's just a natural object.
Anything can be a circus if you listen to people who don't know what they're talking about.
I think Avi knows what he's doing, and he wants other scientists to dismiss him in public, so he gets an audience.
However, there is a chance he could be underestimating that audience, or at least part of it.
Finding a new type of comet is a scientific breakthrough, and I think his work points in that direction (still a guess from him though, but an educated one). He is trying to cake up those potential genuine discovers with sloppy sensacionalist makeup on top, and that's why I call it a circus.
If in a few months we confirm that 3I/ATLAS is a new kind of comet, he could use the papers he wrote to say he found evidence of that new type first, and also described its landmark characteristics. It would "legitimize" him. But the alien stuff would probably continue to be garbage. He can then say the scientists were skeptics, but he was right.
Now, what angle the aliens narrative serve? Why would a scientist subject himself to being a clown? I don't exactly know. In his case, I don't think it's good stuff.
I chose Tabby's Star to satirize him because my description of a mothership deploying an origami-like occluder matches the overall conclusion from the research at the time (a disturbed exomoon). It's an object from that system that changed is shape. In fact, "disturbed exosatellite" and "unfolding mothership from a planet" are quite compatible descriptions. What matters here is epistemology (we can't know if it's natural or not). Also, it's a good demonstration that we (general public non-astronomers) don't need his antics to imagine things.
I've always thought that the public reaction to aliens in Contact was precisely, painfully accurate. Panic, cults, religions, the typical human response to something huge, unknown, and unknowable.
You should see the movie Don't Look Up. It is even more painfully accurate portrayal of our times, and it eeriely explains why the world's richest men are building and testing rockets and spaceships. (Answer: No, it ain't merely for space tourism or mere profits. They know their misdeeds will ruin the Earth one day, so they are preparing a Plan B.)
Dude, the movie Don't Look Up is a metaphor for climate change denialism. It has nothing to do with asteroids.
The movie Don't Look Up is still an apt metaphor, because the variable (how the apocalypse will happen) may change, but the outcome won't.
The same richest elites that refuse to acknowledge and do anything to revert climate change, will do nothing (except try to escape Earth in spaceships) if and when any humanity detects and anticipates any Earth destroying apocalypse inducer (asteroid/meteor or extreme solar flare) from out of the depths of space.
It's kind of a stretch.
To a more naive, metaphor-blind audience, your mention of Don't Look Up makes it look like the scientists are warning about an alien comet and I'm the one ignoring it.
I'm very familiar with apocalyptical narratives of all kinds, but what I'm approaching here is much different. I'm talking about the integrity of scientific endeavours. In particular, space exploration endeavours.
Earth has a number of very high power semi directional transmitters operating. By this I mean the assorted 50 hertz and 60 hertz AC power systems. These are coherent in areas because there are separated adjacent systems that act to isolate them. These are long in wavelength at about 3000 miles and will penetrate the ionosphere via capacitance. If we had a long wave receiver in orbit past the earth, it could listen on an incrementally varying wavelength from 25 hertz to ~~300 hertz for any similarly radiating civilisation. This radiation would be reduced by square law spreading, but a phase locked loop receiver that gradually scanned this frequency space should be able to detect such radiation out to 100-500 light years. The PLL listens for a long integrating interval, and then steps to the next frequency. The antenna can be tuned to cover the 25 Hz to 300 Hz spectrum by use of mechanically adjustable loading coils. Such an antenna could be a simple long wire that is gravitationally solar stabilised so it would sweep annually. A similar one could be earth centered to enable sweeps at it's far from earth orbit much faster than annually? This is a project that Elon Musk could easily perform and it might get us a Nobel? if we found anything? It would sit there and sieve data in hope of success?
With the current world leadership, I'm (non-sarcastically) afraid someone will try to 'export democracy' to Mars.
Don't Look Up
What Do We Do If SETI Is Successful?
Not sure. Can some of HN at least agree that if it's the Empire we all join and act as if we love serving the Emperor and then put subtle code in the planet killing weapons that overload and self destruct if pointed at human listed planets?
If survival is key in that regard, then we'd probably be encouraged to spread/cohabit with other species' planets so that the target is more fuzzy.
Earth might still be at risk, but never underestimate the human ability to sell large tracts of land to foreign investors in exchange for a few concessions.
we'd probably be encouraged to spread/cohabit with other species
I will do my part to find out which humanoid-like species are genetically compatible with as wide of coverage humanly possible.
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Unless we will find some Space Nazis like Qu from All Tomorrows.
If SETI is successful it would be a fascinating to sit back and observe the deeply religious.
The Catholic church answered this question ages ago. I assume the other major religions did too. It's really not concerning at all to the institution; the major problem would be with people who don't actually understand their own religion.
Granted, this would be a lot of people, but I think it'd be a midrange of "kinda religious, but not enough to dive in"-types who are mostly freaking out over the revelation.
So, how does the story go? Only earth is blessed by god, because Jesus crashed here, and all the alien races are toast because they didn’t have a chance to learn about Christ, Savior of the strange bipeds from Earth?
I’m sure they came up with an elaborate story how Jesus loves sentient mollusks from Alpha Centauri, but I hope most people are smart enough to realise how little sense it all makes. I for one am curious how this plays out, if I’m lucky enough to witness it.
Check out: "UFO, End Times Delusion" as an example of a fundie take on extra terrestrials. A bit old now, not sure if they've updated it, but it's the kind of stuff I was raised in in the 80s/90s.
tl;dr Humans were first and most important, but if you're omnipotent and building an ant farm, it's logical to provide a nearly infinite number of things to interest and enrich your creations. If there are other creatures, and they're given a rational soul, they were also made aware of God's existence.
At the end of the day, the Catholics (at least) don't believe they were given full knowledge of the universe at some arbitrary point in the past. Instead, we were plopped into it and expected to explore and understand it. This will require us to occasionally update our teachings - just like how scientists need to update their teachings when they discover they didn't understand something before.
It's unbelievably obnoxious to simply assume everyone who doesn't scoff at religion simply isn't "smart enough". You clearly haven't taken much time to understand the topic if you can't come up with even one good argument. Even Richard Dawkins is able to connect with religious logic to a degree.
Note that I didn’t refer to religion as a whole, but the combination of Catholicism and sentient alien life in particular. I am definitely able to sympathise with believing in a kind of architect giving it all a sense of meaning, even if I don’t share that notion. But desperate attempts of wringing a somewhat coherent argument out of texts written for a feudal society millennia ago? That’s just coping.
Oh, then sure, I won't argue with you there. It's up to you at that point to find the arguments convincing or not.
I think the idea of Imago Dei is actually the most believable part. I am absolutely convinced that we're the forerunners of this universe. The first scenario where a creation becomes aware of its creator - even if I'm imagining the wrong architect.
The Catholics learned a lot during their witch-hunts regarding heliocentrism..
It would depend a lot on what the alien species was like.
If they go "oh yeah Religion, that's a quirk of your biology, don't worry you will outgrow it in time" then yeah, that's problematic.
If they go "Oh, you say that the savior Jesus Christ was a human? That answers one of our biggest questions. The story never made much sense before. Boy, those Angels must be pretty freaky looking for you then." then that's entirely different.
Most will quickly look and discover the bible is silent on the topic which leaves plenty of room for God to create other aliens.
I'm not familiar with every religion, but I think most can say the same.
I don't think it would make any difference.
Religion is completely disconnected from reality, making up things as they go.
A signal from a life form would either be conspiracy or a signal from god, so strong that we cannot understand it.
Either way, no real difference with what we have today.
The new proposed protocol from IAA that the article references but does not link to: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.14506
IMO a protocol that doesn't involve automated instantaneous backing up of data on a publicly-referenceable blockchain is worthless due to the apparently legitimate (in the eyes SETI researchers that a former SETI institute chairman references) concern about security services quietly stepping in the way.
(see my other comment for reference)